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YALE YESTERDAYS

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YALE YESTERDAYS

BY

THE LATE CLARENCE DEMING

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EDITED BY
MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY

WITH A FOREWORD BY

HENRY WALCOTg1 FARNAM

5

YALE YESTERDAYS

BY
THE LATE CLARENCE DEMING

EDITED BY
MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY

WITH A FOREWORD BY
HENRY WALCOTT FARNAM

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCCXV

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

First printed February, 1915, 1,000 copies.

PUBLISHERS1 NOTE

Tne publish ers'jrisb to express their indebt-
fedA^iotKef Editors of the Yale Alumni Weekly
for permission to' reprint those essays in this
volume which first appeared in the columns of
their paper, as well as for the use of the illus-
trations.

FOREWORD

Clarence Deming was known to many but under-
stood by few. This was not due to any reserve, either
of manner or of expression, on his part. As a jour-
nalist he was obliged constantly to come into contact
with all sorts and conditions of men. Through his
writings he was known to many who had never seen
him. If, nevertheless, comparatively few really under-
stood the nature and character of the man, the cause
lay, not in any concealment on his part, but rather in
an altogether exceptional frankness and honesty. His
scorn of appearances and of conventions was so great
that appearances often did him injustice. In an age
which attaches such value to the label as to throw
about it the protection of the law, he was willing to
go without any label, rather than wear one that he
might not merit. Few knew that words which sounded
blunt voiced a disposition kindly and gentle, as well
as an honesty of purpose so courageous, that it was
indifferent to the impression produced on others.
His courage was especially conspicuous when, as often
happened, he was engaged in fighting some political or
moral wrong. Then the recording journalist was con-
verted into the reforming citizen, and he would keep
up the fight regardless of the prejudice or indifference
of those who should have helped him.

Deming was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, October
i, 1848, and entered Yale College in 1867 with the
class of '71. On account of severe injury received in

vi FOREWORD

playing baseball, he was obliged to fall back into the
class of 1872. The writer was accordingly in college
with him for two years, but his real acquaintance with
him only dates from 1884. Being one of a few citizens
who had acquired a small interest in the Morning News
Company, the writer soon found himself obliged, either
to secure control of the paper for himself and his
friends, or allow it to fall into the hands of those whose
policy he could not endorse. With the responsibility
of journalistic management thus suddenly thrust upon
him, he looked about for someone to take editorial
charge of the paper and bethought himself of Clarence
Deming, at that time a free lance journalist, who had
just completed for the New York Evening Post a
series of studies published in book form under the
title, uBy-ways of Nature and Life." Deming ac-
cepted the position in February, 1884, and entered at
once with eagerness into the plan of editing an inde-
pendent newspaper.

In those days independence in politics, as in journal-
ism, was considered by most people rank heresy.
Practically every newspaper was expected to have
strong political affiliations. Every voter was expected
to wear the badge of some party. The Cleveland
campaign broke the ice, but the Mugwumps of that
day were looked upon with suspicion and even dislike
by not a few of their friends. To class them with
Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold was thought by
many to smack of flattery. The Morning News was a
small undertaking with little capital, with no history
back of it, and without even the advantage of the
Associated Press Service. In a dingy back room of our
quarters on State Street, overlooking the railroad cut,
and in an atmosphere fouled by smoke from the

FOREWORD vii

locomotives, Deming performed the exacting daily
drudgery of an editor. He not only wrote the edi-
torials, but also made arrangements for securing
telegraphic news service, stock exchange reports, and
local news. At the same time he tried to keep the
expenses down to a minimum. In those days without
wife, children, or immediate dependents, he might have
lived on his private income, and only done such writing
as would have been a pleasure and a recreation. He
had no personal interest in New Haven, except that
of a Yale graduate. But the task of working for clean
politics and clean journalism appealed to him, and he
threw himself into it with the zeal of a Crusader. The
Cleveland campaign gave him abundant opportunity
to prove his mettle, and he contributed not a little
towards carrying the state for the Democratic national
ticket. At the same time he showed his independence
by first urging the Republicans to nominate Henry B.
Harrison for governor, and subsequently working for
his election.

It was in this first year that Deming began what
proved to be a long fight against the abuse of repor-
torial gratuities. It had been customary for the state
legislature at the end of each session to appropriate
sums of money for the representatives of the various
papers which reported its proceedings. Deming him-
self, though editor-in-chief, undertook to report the
session in 1884, in order to familiarize himself with
state politics, and when he found that the legislature
offered him a gratuity of $200 for doing this profes-
sional work, he promptly and indignantly returned it.
The paper also returned two sums of $50 each, which
had been voted to its reporter by the selectmen and
by the common council of New Haven. From that

viii FOREWORD

time until his death Deming never rested in his warfare
against this abuse, which seemed to him a peculiarly
contemptible form of petty graft, because designed
insidiously to undermine the character and honor of
his profession. It is obvious that, when those who are
to report the proceedings of a legislative body solicit
from its members a grant out of public funds, the
channels of public information are defiled at their very
source.

This abuse has now been eliminated from the city
government of New Haven, where it has been un-
known for many years, and there is every reason to
believe that the action of the Morning News in 1884
went far towards bringing about this result. The
history of the movement against legislative subsidies
is less simple, but possesses points of interest which
deserve to be recorded. For a good many years many
of the better papers of Connecticut have refused to
allow their reporters to be subsidized by the legis-
lature, but many others, among them some whose self-
respect might have been expected to prevent them from
sharing in the money, have continued to accept it,
and as long as the legislature has the power to make
such appropriations as are within the constitution, it is
very difficult for any individual or group of individuals
to overcome the persistent efforts of the newspaper
lobby. In 1911, however, a peculiar situation arose,
which Deming was quick to see and to take advantage
of. The House in that year refused to make the
reportorial appropriation, but the Senate passed a
resolution to pay the money as a part of its contingent
expenses, under a rule which was numbered 27.
Clarence Deming, associating with himself four friends,
applied for an injunction based on the claim that the

FOREWORD ix

services for which the reporters were ostensibly paid
were fictitious, and that the Senate had no right under
the law to make such payments. The case was so
strong that the injunction was granted, and the legal
victory seemed won. But in September, near the end
of an unusually long session, the reporters took advan-
tage of a thin house to get the Senate to repeal Rule
27, and then immediately to pass Resolution 133, which
practically repeated the provisions of Rule 27, even
specifying by name the same reporters and same sums.
The reporters, who were waiting for the resolution to
pass, promptly applied to the comptroller for their
gratuities and, before the afternoon papers could
report the proceedings, had carried off their booty.
Deming and his associates thereupon brought proceed-
ings against the comptroller and treasurer for con-
tempt of court, engaging as their attorneys the late
Henry C. White, and Leonard M. Daggett of New
Haven. In the decision which was handed down
January 23, 1912, the judge went over the history of
the case thoroughly, and discussed at length the ques-
tion, how far the injunction which prohibited payments
under "Rule 27" could be applied to the identical pay-
ments when ticketed "Resolution 133." He summed up
the matter by saying, "The consideration of these
facts would, I think, suggest to men of less intelligence
and experience in matters connected with the state
government than the defendants, that the reporters,
having been prevented by the injunction from receiving
their gratuities under authority of Rule 27, were now
trying to get them in a different way, and that to pay
them under Resolution 133 would defeat the object
sought to be obtained by the plaintiffs. " Nevertheless
the decision concluded by saying, "The burden of proof

FOREWORD

that they have offended is on the plaintiffs, and, if
there be doubt, the defendants are entitled to the
benefit of it." Judgment was, therefore, rendered in
their favor, and the long and expensive fight seemed
lost. The only gain was an injunction which had been
rendered inoperative by changing the label. Yet in
the very year in which Deming died the legislature
refused to appropriate the gratuities, and if the future
shows that this means their permanent abolition, the
credit will be due to Clarence Deming, though he did
not live to see the victory won.

This story has been told with a detail that may seem
to some disproportionate to its importance, because it
is typical. The abuse itself is typical of the kind of
abuse which grows up in our state. The campaign
against it was typical of Deming. The long time that
it required to make an impression upon the legislature
was typical of other reform movements. Moreover,
this is one of the episodes which I am sure Deming
himself would have taken particular pleasure in writing
up, had he lived to do so. In fact, we often spoke
together of preparing jointly a history of our expe-
rience on the Morning News. Financially the paper
was never a success and, in spite of the support of men
of the highest standing, it had to give up its independent
existence. Nevertheless I believe that its influence was
not only good but effective, and the history of the news-
paper gratuities is but one of the indirect outgrowths
of that modest and now almost forgotten enterprise.

Deming's public services were not confined to fight-
ing the reportorial gratuities. From the beginning he
was much interested in civil service reform and was
active as a member of the executive committee of our

FOREWORD xi

association. During the searching investigation of
police conditions in New Haven and the campaign
against policy shops and pool rooms, which was begun
in 1894 by Dr. Smyth and a handful of associates,
Deming was always ready to support the movement,
both by his pen and by personal effort. He was keenly
alive to railroad problems, and studied particularly the
New Haven road, writing frequent dispatches regard-
ing it for the Evening Post. In consequence of his
familiarity with the subject, he was on two occasions
asked to act as arbitrator in disputes between the rail-
road and the trolley men. In time more and more of
his writing came to be devoted to railroad subjects,
and he was a frequent contributor to the Railway
Gazette. The London Times paid him the well-
deserved compliment of asking him to write for its
special American Railway Number of June 28, 1912,
an article on railroads in New England, printed on
pages 42 to 45 of that issue.

To the great body of Yale men Deming is probably
best known through his contributions to the Yale
Alumni Weekly. For years his analyses of the treas-
urer's reports gave to graduates a singularly clear view
of a document which it is not easy to read without an
interpreter. But he was not satisfied to analyze and
explain. He was ever on the alert to point out, with
all consideration and loyalty to his Alma Mater, any-
thing that looked like an abuse, or that suggested a
lack of frankness or clarity. His reports on the
treasury figures had mainly an ephemeral interest and
are wisely omitted from this volume, but they should
not be forgotten among the services which he rendered
to Yale.

xii FOREWORD

Men show what they are in their play as truly as in
their work, and no sketch of the personality of Clarence
Deming is complete which fails to mention fishing.
Though a noted baseball player and an all-round
athlete in college, he gave little time to active exercise
in his later years, and fishing became almost his sole
recreation. But he was no ordinary fisherman. He
devoted himself to it with a veritable passion, regard-
less of personal discomfort and of personal appear-
ances. Nor was he a mere sportsman, intent upon
making a record-breaking catch and bragging about it
afterwards. He carried the curiosity of a real
naturalist into the practice of the "gentle art," and was
keenly observant of the habits of the fish and of the
influences of their environment, wherever he went.
It was remarkable how many articles on fishing he
contributed to Outing and other magazines. Indeed,
in the bibliography which was published in his class
book in 1913, no less than eighteen out of thirty-three
titles relate to angling. His conversation as well as
his printed articles brought to light many piscatorial
oddities and puzzles, and it may be said that he loved
the fish as William the Conqueror loved the red deer,
"as though he had been their father." His family
took satisfaction in the thought that his last resting
place in the Litchfield hills overlooked one of his
favorite fishing ponds.

The descendant of an old New England family
from a typical New England town, and an under-
graduate of Yale in the period which immediately
preceded the expansion and changes of recent years, he
has rescued from oblivion and preserved for future
generations choice sketches drawn from his own recol-

FOREWORD xiii

lections, which will not soon be forgotten. The keen
interest of the reporter in anything novel or excep-
tional, the quick eye for relative values, the scientific
interest in going below the surface to search for causes,
which characterized his "By-ways of Nature and Life,"
came to be focused, as it were, in the last thirty years of
his life on New England, and on Yale. Thus the
volume before us has a unity of aim and subject which
the earlier one lacks. In comparing the two it is also
interesting to note the development of his style. From
the beginning he was a vigorous writer, but his peculiar
raciness of language, his fertility in coining new words
or new combinations, grew with years, and gave to all
of his writings an individuality so marked, that the
signature UC. D." was never needed to indicate the
author. This gift of expression effervesced sponta-
neously in conversation. A long association in an
informal club, which for over thirty years has met
fortnightly during the winter months, has given the
writer many opportunities to observe his conversational
gifts. Never a dictatorial Dr. Johnson, never a self-
assertive conversational monopolist, never an autocrat
of the supper table, he almost always became, before
the evening was over, the center of the table talk.

Many a time since his death have we longed to hear
again his pungent comments on the many startling
events of the last two years. How keenly he would
have discussed the kaleidoscopic changes in the New
York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, the legis-
lative measures before Congress, the international
cataclysm in the midst of which we are still living.
We can only surmise what he might have to say on
these and other topics. But we can at least live over

xh FOREWORD

again in reading the present volume some of the dis-
cussions of the past, and we owe a debt of thanks to
the members of his family who have gathered together
for permanent preservation these products of his
inquisitive and active mind.

HENRY W. FARNAM.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Foreword ...... v

I. College Buildings and their Vicissitudes . i

1. The Old College Campus . . 3

2. Yale's Old Brick Row . . 8

3. The Old Chapel in the Sixties . 15

4. The Hillhouse Place . . .21

5. The Passing of Two Yale Hostel-

ries ..... 24

6. The Twilight of Alumni Hall . 33

II. Campus Traditions, Customs and Charac-
ters ..... 39

1. The Burial of Euclid . . . 41

2. Town and Gown Riots . . 51

3. Old Troubles in Commons . . 60

4. Yale's Fiercest Student Battle . 66

5. The Old "Statement of Facts" . 73

6. Two Extinct Class Honors . . 80

7. Wooden Spoon Memories . . 85

8. Forerunners of Tap Day . . 92

9. George Joseph Hannibal, L. W.

Silliman . . . .95

III. Faculty Reminiscences . . .105

1. The Old Yale Classroom . . 107

2. An Old School Professor . . 116

3. Annals of Old-Time Examinations 124

4. Yale Astronomy, Old and New . 130

xvi UUJM l\tLJM IS

IV.

Yale Worthies .....

135

i. South Middle's Roll of Honor .

137

2. The Times of Bagg .

149

3. An Early Undergraduate Genius .

155

4. A Theological Martyr

162

5. Ik Marvel, Prose-lPoet

169

6. The Westminster of Yale .

173

V.

Athletics of Yore ....

183

i. A Reverie of the Game

185

2. General Athletics in the Seventies

187

3. Reminiscences of Old Yale Base-

ball

192

4. Yale Football of the Fifties

208

VI.

From the Annals of the Treasury .

223

i. Yale's Treasury

225

2. Early Gifts to Yale .

231

3. British Gifts to Yale .

239

Index 245

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Clarence Deming . . . Frontispiece

FACING
PAGE

College Street in the Seventies ... 4
The Old Brick Row and Fence ... 8
The Old Brick Row (looking north) in the
Nineties, showing South Middle and the
Lyceum . . . . . .12

Interior of the Old Chapel . . . .16

The Old Campus (looking south) about 1870,
showing the Lyceum, the Old Chapel and
North College with the Treasury Building
and Library beyond . . . .18

Hillhouse Avenue in 1841 .... 22

The Old Pavilion Hotel . . 24

Chapel Street and the Art School in the Seventies 30
Moseley's New Haven House . . .32

Alumni Hall ...... 34

A Group of '71 Men at the College Pump . 68

George Joseph Hannibal, L. W. Silliman . 96

Candy Sam and Wife ..... 100

Professor Elias Loomis . . . .116

Fireplace in Eli Whitney's Room in South

Middle . . . . . .140

The Old Library . ... 148

Donald G. Mitchell and his Home at Edgewood 170
Entrance to Hamilton Park . . . .196

James Hillhouse, Yale 1773 . . . 226

Sheldon Clark ...... 234

YALE YESTERDAYS

COLLEGE BUILDINGS AND THEIR
VICISSITUDES

I

THE OLD COLLEGE CAMPUS

The downy young Senior of Yale College today and
the sub-Freshman five years younger confronting the
first terrors of his preliminary examination see a great
college plant in a condition of geographical and struc-
tural transition. The Senior is soon to leave a Campus
which, before he revisits it at his triennial reunion,
may have a number of structural additions and sub-
tractions; and the sub-Freshman ere, five years later,
he clasps his longed-for sheepskin, may witness visually
those changes going on and some of them completed.
But the basic conception will remain of a stately
academic quadrangle flanked by arcades on the north
with remote possibilities of small quadrangles on the
west. All these transitions which have shifted the
Campus of fifty years ago into the quadrangle and
Campus of today impress the old graduate in many
ways. Where once was a merger of homely brick row
with stately tree life is now a grand quadrangle, but
without the tree life of the old type. There are, to be
sure, certain faint suggestions of the earlier Yale of
the elms. Here and there upon the new quadrangle
stands an ancient tree, survivor of time and beetle, but
decrepit and devitalized; a new generation of young
elms, watched and warded by the experts of the Forest
School, outlines a hope; and the Yale Oak, already
big, beauteous and waxing with the years, will be a tree
of memories and traditions and have an isolated dig-

YALE YESTERDAYS

nity of its own. But uncertainly at the best does the
inner quadrangle pledge any reproduction on slighter
scale of the grand archways of elm which in the last
mid-century flanked the College front, which trans-
figured with their sylvan grace prosaic brick and
mortar, which were elemental in Yale song and story
and which the old graduate so sadly misses now.
William Croswell, Yale '22, in later life, expressed
the idea in a punning stanza of a longer poem:

"Tres faciunt Collegium" each jurist now agrees,
Which means, in the vernacular, a College made of trees.
And bosomed high in tufted boughs yon venerable rows
The maxim in its beauty and its truth alike disclose.

Fifty years ago and Mr. Croswell's word-picture
was a realism. A mighty line of elms of girth, of
spread and leafy richness stood just inside the western
curb of College Street. It was mated by another line
some thirty feet away on the College grounds and that
by yet another just in front of the Brick Row. The
resultant was two vast arches, high, symmetrical, a
great nave of bough and leaf which, as studied by the
sylvan critics of the time, dimmed even the famed
glory of Temple Street. Only the pale reflection of
them appears in the photographs of the period which—
with the camera aimed at the Brick Row and not at the
elms — are for the most part winter or late autumn
pictures when the elms were leafless.

These big elms with their grateful cover in summer
heats were a force in the Campus life unrealized by
Yale's younger graduates. They shaded the College
Street side of that immemorial and lamented roost, the
"Fence" ; they left the Campus open to summer breeze
while they intercepted blazing sunlight and made the

THE OLD COLLEGE CAMPUS

Campus at once a studio and lounging place; and they
transmuted for a large fraction of the day the indoor
to an outdoor life. The Campus was mowed now and
then by the scythe. If the hay crop was small it was
enough to give the Campus a rural aroma and deepen
the outdoor sense of airiness and space. Thus, the old
Campus was a natural undergraduate hiving ground
and without the class distinctions of the Fence. Inci-
dentally also it exemplified the Spartan animus of the
Faculty; for, as now recalled, never but for one brief
period did college authority grant a single seat. The
student recumbent on the grass or perched on the Fence
was the limit of Faculty concession — a policy to which,
perchance, the old Fence owes its sacred traditions.

The exceptional period referred to when the Faculty
experimentally tried "benching" the Campus was at a
date somewhere in the middle sixties when complaints
from citizens against blocking the sidewalks and dis-
orders at the college corner led to an edict imposing
five marks for sitting on the Fence. College sentiment
rose against the decree. Bigger crowds of students
than ever gathered on the Fence — dispersing as college
authority with its. marking book came in sight — and
the Fence acquired the added enticement of forbidden
fruit. Night after night the rails were pulled down
and out, and for a whole winter the Fence cost the
treasury a pretty penny for night watchmen. Next
spring the Faculty set benches on the Campus but the
new seats were boycotted. At last the Faculty yielded
and its decree fell into innocuous desuetude.

The archaic Campus of the eighteenth century ap-
pears to have had a certain shut-in quality. The rules
of the College set forth in the Latin that if any student
leaped the board fence — Vallum tabulatum exsultav-

YALE YESTERDAYS

erit — he should be fined not less than sixpence — sex
denarii. This suggests that there was then a policy of
exclusion and inclusion. The records do not shed light
on the date when the ancient board fence went down
and the glorified rail fence that wore through so many
generations of college integuments went up. But as a
barrier it was symbolic, not actual, and was a kind of
hospitable invitation to the public. The Campus, in
fact, became well-nigh as open as a village green.
Tramps, beggars, organ grinders, agents, peddlers-
lineal antecedents of Hannibal and Candy Sam — went
in and out at will. On every side of the open Campus
was easy ingress and outgo without the restraint of
watchman or police. As a short cut to the corners of a
large city square, the Campus thus became a kind of
thoroughfare. Where now are gates and entrances
were then no obstacles more serious than the low
double-railed fence. This open-hearted view of the
Campus had its vantages as well as defects. If the
student conning the pons asinorum of Euclid found
intruders a nuisance, the free rule of in-go and exit
did not debar the wandering minstrel from the Campus
or exclude the diverting oratorical periods of General
Daniel Pratt.

In these days of Campus policemen and electric
lights, the undergraduate little wots what a lure to
mischief the old Campus became o' nights. There were
spaces for flight or hiding 'twixt all the dormitories;
other spaces behind the old Cabinet buildings, the
Laboratory, Trumbull Gallery and the North and
South Coal yards — each periodically going up in
smoke — and over all the Cimmerian darkness inten-
sified by the elms. The fugitive from the pursuing
tutor had choice of flight in a dozen directions besides

THE OLD COLLEGE CAMPUS

the larger outlets of the city streets. Those who tell of
the small or extinguished vandalisms of the modern
Campus, the abatement of noise and riot, the hustlings
which changed the old form of Senior elections into
Tap Day and the decline of student prankeries in gen-
eral, forget how much the betterment is due to the
merely physical environment of the modern Campus
life. The temptations of that old Campus made many
undergraduate sinners out of original saints.

But the old Campus had some compensating virtues.
It was more of a living place for the undergraduate
than the enclosure of today. College activities
focussed upon it. Classes met, intermingled and
swapped acquaintance. It stood for the academic cen-
tralities, — and that not merely because of the Fence,
but as a sequel of the character of the Campus itself
as a common meeting ground. It had the virtues of
intensity as represented by the relatively "small" col-
lege. Supplemented by the inner and intense life of
the Brick Row, who will say with certitude that the old
Campus as a character-builder, with all its faults, had
not traits that stand well when matched with the up-to-
date luxuries when the electric light satirizes the old
kerosene and the bathtub has displaced the college
pump?

II

YALE'S OLD BRICK ROW

Almost exactly one-third of a century of time and a
full generation of men have gone by since the fall of
Old Divinity College and the rise of Farnam and Dur-
fee Halls heralded a physical change on the Yale Cam-
pus in which South Middle now only remains, a lonely
and isolated relic, to tell of the life that went on in the
Old Brick Row. The transit has been one which affects
not merely externals and those things that meet the eye,
but touches also the academic routine at a hundred
points. The Row and what we may almost call its
personality, had their acute relations to scholarship, to
discipline, to undergraduate purpose, to student morals,
to the day's walk and the day's work; and if the more
subtle influences could be traced, it would probably be
found that they bore hardly less upon the Faculty than
upon the undergraduate. All these memories of the
Row deepen and throng just now when the restoration
of South Middle,1 eldest of the goodly company, draws
near and celebrates rather than renews the dormitory
life of ancestral Yale.

Yale graduates are probably not many who have
reflected on the topographical results of the shift from
archaic Brick Row to new Quadrangle. The Quad-

1 In 1905, South Middle, now known by its earlier name of Con-
necticut Hall, was restored to the Colonial style in which it was
originally built.

YALE'S OLD BRICK ROW

rangle is an enclosure; The Row had the open quality
and space freedoms of a village green. The Quad-
rangle— at least most of it — turns its back to New
Haven with a kind of monastic exclusiveness ; The Row
smiled open-faced on the city with a sort of democratic
greeting. "Who enters here," says The Quadrangle,
"must pass the iron gate, as an emblem, at least, of
exclusion, or find contracted entrance 'twixt the
crowded structures of the new Yale." "Jump the
fence," said The Row. "Come in where you please and
go where you please." The Row had The Fence as an
outlying roost cf mighty length and popularity front-
ing the urban activities of Chapel Street; The Quad-
rangle owns but a ghostly simulacrum that satirizes the
glory of its ancestor. The Quadrangle has its electric
flame o' nights and its policeman, both arch foes of
academic mischief; The Row, steeped in darkness and
rich in nooks, corners and exit and egress, gave kindly
cover to the fugitive from college justice and the hot-
footed tutor. Finally there were the elms, shading a
genuine Campus, in arches that rivalled famed Temple
Street and wakened the muse of whole generations of
Yale poets. Those historic boles and sheltering arms
the Brick Row owned in full title; the Quadrangle now
encloses but two or three of the grand, old-fashioned
tree-types along with a few descendants in embryo —
and with the Yale Oak, alone, to suggest a future Yale
altar for tree-worship.

In the order of physical merit and as a dormitory in
the practical sense of the term, Divinity College
undoubtedly ranked first in The Row — not merely
because it was youngest and newest, but because the
average theologue was a milder tenant than the secular
collegian, whose prime ambition was to leave some

io YALE YESTERDAYS

lasting mark upon wall, doorway or coal closet. Next,
as to internal physique, came North Middle — a fact
charged up to honest original workmanship. North
College came next, followed by South and, naturally
when the infirmities of age are reckoned in, South
Middle last. But the qualities for living and for the
creature comforts of each member of the Old Brick
Row were relative rather than absolute. All of them
had their flaws, only varying in degree. Each had its
sagging beams, its billowy floor, its cracked ceiling, its
panels deep-furrowed by college pokers, its abiding
impression of roughness and the ineradicable musty
odor which nothing could subdue; and, as to other
arrangements, sanitation shrieked. Young plutocrats
now and then, by costly outlay in putty, paint, and wall
paper, tried to give the Brick Row room a semblance
of luxury, but in vain. There was a tradition forty
years ago of a Sybarite Junior from Fifth Avenue who
spent a whole year's tuition fee in three coats of hard,
white paint on the walls of his North College room.
The tale is rescued from death by the further fact that,
returning one night, too deep in Moriarty's ale, his
roommate found him trying to hang his hat up on a fly.
The tale of another of Moriarty's victims whose entry
mates found him with his foot caught in a crack of a
South Middle floor and kept him standing all night, is
more apocryphal.

How the Yale classes distributed themselves in The
Row during its earlier years the records do not reveal;
but during the sixties the two upper classes — which, in
the dearth of college rooms, were the only classes
assured of lodgment on the Campus — hived in The
Row in accord with a certain definite custom. South
College was the Senior focus. Its nearness to The

YALE'S OLD BRICK ROW u

Fence and to Chapel Street and its centrality in Cam-
pus life probably accounted for the favor that it found
in the class that had first choice in college lodgings.
Seniors left over scattered through North and North
Middle; but the latter was by tradition and habit a
"Junior" dormitory. South Middle, dilapidated,
scabby and malodorous with the must of ages, took
the spillings of both classes and especially such men
as could only afford cheap rooms. After the Senior
and Junior classmen had made their choices there were
a few of the very worst rooms left over — usually on
the damp first floors — which were taken up by Sopho-
mores or impecunious Freshmen. Of the floors in The
Row, the second always ranked first in precedence. It
was low enough to avert the tedious climb up the steep
and footworn stairways and high enough to elude some
of the ground floor moisture and smells — albeit there
was always the drawback of rooming on the same floor
with a tutor, who might be sensitive to noise and have
disciplinary moods. "High hook" among the college
rooms, if that fishy metaphor may be used, was in the
language of the time "South College, south entry, sec-
ond floor, front corner," representing as it did the most
desirable connecting link of the Campus, The Fence
and The Town.

In the Senior and Junior classes the choices of rooms
were made by lot at class meetings, presided over by
a tutor. A poor man's lucky high choice could always
be exchanged for a rich man's low drawing, and com-
manded a bonus that sometimes reached $75 or even
$100. This plan had its advantages and evils. On the
one hand it often gave the poor student working his
way through college a handsome lift ; on the other hand
it offered to the rich an opportunity to flock together

12 YALE YESTERDAYS

and upack" an entry. To some small extent it fostered
cliques and now and then was abused in the Junior
class to work a particular group into society honors.
Nevertheless, as a whole, the life of The Row was
ultra-democratic. Men mixed well, rubbed off angles,
and upperclassmen relaxed class lines and found each
other out.

Doubtless South Middle, by virtue of seniority and
as the original Yale dormitory, could tell more tales
of student pranks than any other structure of the
extinct Row. But in the sixties, South College was the
chief font of undergraduate trickery and the center of
conspiracy when any plot against authority was to be
brewed. Standing at the end of the Brick Row it pro-
jected as a kind of prow into the currents of the town.
The fugitive from the street rush found it a quick
asylum from city authority, while conversely, the stu-
dent chased by the tutor passed easily to the street;
and just behind it were the obscuring shades of the
Laboratory, of the Cabinet building and of the South
Coal Yard to check pursuit. It was a breed of tutor
either uncommonly vigilant or watchful that during a
year's service in South College could minimize the bill
for new glass or escape disastrous bombardment by
cannon crackers as Fourth of July drew on. In South
College it was, as the legend goes, that there was
carried out the successful "stunt" of rolling a hot
cannon ball against an unpopular tutor's door with
acute sequels when he tried to pick it up; and, as now
recalled, it was a South College tutor who described
his academic stipend as "$500 a year, free room and
coal thrown in." A tale certified here as true, is that
of a South College Senior who escaping from a faculty
raid on an orgy took high risks of his neck by climbing

THE OLD BRICK Row (LOOKING NORTH) IN THE NINETIES
Showing South Middle and The Lyceum

YALE'S OLD BRICK ROW 13

down from the fourth story on the half-decayed
window shutters.

A second member of the Old Brick Row that was a
constant source of disorder and prankery was the
Lyceum. Sixty feet up on the tower in tempting near-
ness to the lightning rod was the college clock, seduc-
tive target for snowballs and whose hands, mutilated
or missing, often bore dumb testimony to the rash
academic spoilsman who had "shinned" by night up
the rod to attack the venerable timepiece. When the
clock was removed years after, it was related that the
college carpenter for the first time in his life took a
vacation. In the Lyceum tower was the college bell,
another fertile mark of trickery and innocent victim
of many an undergraduate plot. The theft of the
tongue during one college period became almost com-
monplace. More ingenious was the venturous under-
graduate who one cold winter night "gagged" the bell
by turning it upside down, filled it with water and left
it to freeze solid. Most ingenious of all was another
student who by night tongue-tied the bell by two cords
leading sidewise to rooms in North Middle and South
Middle. Confederates at each end of the cords then
dinged out a lively peal; and it is told that the colored
janitor who climbed to the belfry with a lantern and
cut one cord but overlooked the other, was so smitten
with superstitious awe that he hardly dared venture
back, when, after a few minutes' pause, the mystic
tocsin rung out anew. But mischief and disorder,
although more common than now, were, after all, mere
frills on the student life of the Old Brick Row. The
current moved in a narrow channel, but with even sur-
face and by smooth shores. Scholastically, The Row,
as a whole, spelled hard work in a curriculum where

14 YALE YESTERDAYS

each man from raw Freshman to graduating Senior
toed the same line. The youngster of today with his
two hundred electives for his pick, may smile as he cons
the schedule of half a century ago with not more than
ten branches of study through the four years; but that
is because he never faced Newton in Mathematics or
Hadley in Greek. Socially, a student life that con-
verged on a single Campus and four dormitories was
necessarily intense. Men rubbed each other hard and
the attrition spelled character. Topics of college inter-
est were relatively few. Athletics, for an example, had
not grown diversified and football had not dawned big
above the Yale horizon. But the Brick Row had its
share of diversions and, if it had fewer things to think
about, it thought harder about the things it had. Even
for the stately quadrangle which has supplanted it,
The Row, with restored South Middle for its last
emblem, has its enduring lessons.

Ill

THE OLD CHAPEL IN THE SIXTIES

The Yale undergraduate of today, attending prayers
and Sunday service in Battell Chapel or Woolsey Hall,
little wots of the contrasts in formal religious obser-
vance between the times of the Old Chapel in the
sixties and the gentler, more aesthetic and — it may be
added — deeper religious observance of the present col-
lege generation.

The change has been physical, functional, emotional
and mental. Then was the severe old Puritan struc-
ture, with its ungarnished auditorium; now ornate Bat-
tell Chapel or the stately and ample simplicity of Wool-
sey Hall. Then was a "college preacher" filling the
pulpit Sunday after Sunday — prolix and apt to be
droning in utterance, trite and repetitious in phrasing;
now the short sermon, pointed and impressive, drop-
ping from the lips of a succession of the most eminent
preachers of the land. Then was a choir small in
numbers and a bit monotonous; now a choir of num-
bers, high training and variety of musical theme. And
finally, but not least in its bearing on the undergrad-
uate attitude toward official religious ceremony, there
were then two long services on Sundays besides morn-
ing prayers; now but one service. In these days the
proposition that compulsory "Chapel" be retained com-
mands its big undergraduate majority; then, had the
proposition been raised, it is doubtful whether outside
of a few dubbed "religious cranks," it would have had

16 YALE YESTERDAYS

its dozen votes in an undergraduate electorate of five
hundred.

The Old Chapel, first opened for services in 1824,
stood near the center of the Brick Row. Its site may
be roughly identified now by placing its rear twenty or
thirty feet in front of the Woolsey statue and its pil-
lared front some eighty feet to the eastward, nearly on
a line with the front elevation of Connecticut Hall,
then South Middle College. Built of brick and sand-
stone to harmonize with the Brick Row, its outward
proportions were symmetrical; its frontal porch and
colonnade owned real architectural grace — though the
belated student, rushing to prayers, didn't often stop
to admire — and the round tapering spire rising to one
hundred and twenty feet was a thing of veritable
beauty.

But whatever its external graces, they were lost in
the asceticism of its vitals. For its auditorium was of
the severest orthodox type, as though devised expressly
to chasten both undergraduate flesh and spirit — par-
ticularly the former. High at the end rose the old-
fashioned "meeting house" pulpit with its double
ascending stairs. Eight boxes after the fashion of
"bins" — two at the rear, one on each side and two
elevated at each side of the pulpit — were conning
towers of the Faculty for student misdeed; and in the
main space were the narrow and hard seats holding
four undergraduates each, where sat the monitors and
their victims. Not without point was a mock college
dictionary of the time which defined prayers as "ser-
vices at one end of the Chapel," while, as for Sunday
services, they were one long conflict between the col-
lege pastor and the conning towers on the one hand and
Morpheus on the other.

THE OLD CHAPEL IN THE SIXTIES 17

This conflict reached some nice official technicalities.
Thus, a student who dropped his head to the rail of
the seat in front — save during actual prayer — was
officially "asleep" and so marked. But if he closed
his eyes sitting upright or eke lolling on a classmate, he
was officially awake and exempt from penalty. This
bonused upright slumber as a fine art and gave high
undergraduate values to the inside corners of the
alleged "pews."

There were three aisles. At the center and front
sat the Seniors; in front and at one side the Juniors; at
the front and on the other side the Sophomores; while
the Freshmen filled the space behind. In the writer's
time (1868-1872), when the services were ended, the
Freshmen rushed out, the Seniors following quietly,
after bowing to the President, who followed the Fresh-
men. But tradition had it that, in earlier days, the
Seniors, after insisting in vain that the Freshmen
should await Senior egress, repeatedly overtook the
Freshmen and "rushed" them out — hence disorder and
violence, which had to be checked by a Faculty decree
holding back the Seniors and giving the Freshmen first
right of way.

But during the writer's time there was another form
of disorder that went unchecked and which, oddly
enough, rested on the method of ringing the college
bell. For morning prayers the bell was rung a few
minutes, then after an interval tolled for two minutes,
closing with a series of rapid ding dongs for perhaps
ten seconds as final warning. These climacteric bell
strokes led to a veritable rush and temporary bedlam
just before the services opened. It seemed never to
occur to the Faculty that by unifying the bell, the rush
could be abated, if not abolished.

i8 YALE YESTERDAYS

At a period when Chapel by the great body of the
students was reckoned an arch foe and a weapon of
discipline rather than a spiritual agency, mischief got
afoot easily. One of its high-water marks was the
enticement of a dog into the center aisle — especially
when, as once happened, the animal wandered to one
of the tutorial watch towers, lifted his front paws and
gazed meditatively into a raw instructor's face. It
was at a slightly earlier college epoch than that of the
writer that a rooster, taken to Chapel under a Senior's
overcoat, flew the whole length of the Chapel, emitting
its loudest barnyard squawk. Not often did it happen
that the dull monotony of college sermonizing was
varied by the -"break" made by some new preacher.
But in the writer's day it happened twice. A florid
out-of-town parson had a written sermon describing in
one passage the beauties of spring with its warm sun-
shine, genial air, and other vernal tribute. The sermon
happened on a late April Sunday when a blustering
snowstorm was beating against the Chapel panes.
When the "spring" apostrophe was reached, the whole
body of students "caught on," gave a cold shiver and
sigh, crouched and drew up coat collars over necks.
It was a Brooklyn pastor of eminence who perhaps first
in the history of the Old Chapel brought down the
students in a genuine roar of laughter by a metaphor
substantially in the words: "Young men, sometimes
must the sinner be reached by subtlety. In the Arctic
regions the Esquimaux bind coiled whalebone in frozen
blubber of the whale, leave it in the path of the polar
bear, who swallows the lure which, melted by the inter-
nal warmth, releases the bone to rend his vitals. By
such device must the sinner at times be brought to self-
examination and repentance."

THE OLD CHAPEL IN THE SIXTIES 19

In the way of pranking, the leading exploit was that
of a member of one of the classes of the seventies
who, by night, "shinned" up the lightning rod to the
top of the steeple and affixed his class flag. Only a few
days later the flag fell, its staff having rotted with
age. It must have been a close call for the climber.

But if the Old Chapel had its severer aspects as a
medium of college system and discipline, it also had
its strong influences of religious uplift. Now and then
there came a preacher who electrified the students and
under whose sermons no undergraduate eye closed.
Such was Newman Hall of London, who, during a trip
to this country, delivered in the old pulpit two sermons
not soon forgotten by the mass of undergraduates, and,
by some, never forgotten. Now and then, the great
Horace Bushnell came down from Hartford, weak in
frame but mighty as ever in preachment, and it was
in one of his most famous and impressive sermons that
he told the students of his soul wrestlings with reli-
gious doubts when a Senior in the Old Brick Row.
President Woolsey's last Baccalaureate on "God's
Guidance in Youth," preached in the Old Chapel to the
Class of 1871, and afterwards published, remains to
this day as a master work among baccalaureates, with
its vivid and pathetic word-picture of the last reunion
of the few survivors of the class and its appeal for
divine guidance. There were other occasions of uplift,
too. Great men of the country and the world betimes
looked down on the college striplings from the Faculty
pews in the gallery, to fire scholastic ambition for the
world life ahead; and actresses of beauty and fame —
Scott-Siddons and Adelaide Neilson — in the same gal-
lery centered the undergraduate eye on a vision more
alluring than Greek or conic sections. Once a year,

20 YALE YESTERDAYS

somewhat after the analogy of the later Prom, the
girls — New Haven girls — filled the galleries at prayers.
It was to hear the "Christmas Anthem" rendered
by a reinforced choir, after much drill, on the last Sun-
day before Christmas. The anthem was a somewhat
long and stilted set of stanzas, telling of flights of
angels descending from mansions in the skies and lend-
ing itself readily to satire and parody — so readily
indeed that a humorous poetical parody by a bright
young student of the early seventies printed a week
ahead in the Yale Courant made the girls and boys
laugh at Chapel when the anthem was given. And
thereupon, after forty years of life, it died — killed by
a "skit."

IV
THE HILLHOUSE PLACE

Now that Yale University, acting through her
proxies, has acquired the Hillhouse Place, by the gift
of Mrs. Russell Sage, its future place in the line of
most important physical development of Yale has been
clearly outlined. The new physical laboratory on the
Hillhouse property is, in the immediate order of events,
the first of a series of Yale structures that will extin-
guish on the Prospect Street slope the once famous and
attractive Hillhouse Woods. With that structural
emplacement will go, barring the Observatory lot and
the bosky square beyond, almost the last of the fea-
tures that in the elder Yale days gave Prospect Hill its
acute rural setting and tone. Already Prospect Street
is residential in the most exalted social sense, with
stately homes reaching out ambitiously to Mill Rock,
with frontal land values soared and soaring to mighty
prices per running foot. What a contrast with its past
when so late as the middle point of the last century,
the primitive Hillhouse forest was in its sylvan hey-
day; when other woods flanked thickly the westward
slope.

The undergraduate of the sixties, when, following
a drowsy session at Chapel afternoon service, he took
his walk up College Street and northward, found be-
yond the one and original Scientific School building
almost nothing in the way of habitation. On Prospect

22 YALE YESTERDAYS

Street where the railroad bridge now stands and at the
corner, was an old brick factory burned down some-
time in the later sixties. But there was no railroad
bridge. Instead of it was a steep downward pitch to
the railroad and corresponding upward pitch on the
other side, forming a "grade crossing" equally perilous
and unsightly. Passing on and up Prospect Street and
the Hill, one stepped into open country. All land
beyond Sachem Street sold by the acre as on a country
farm! Halfway up the Hill, he passed on the left
the woods which tradition assigned as the spot for the
Burial of Euclid. Beyond, save for two stately dwell-
ings on the crest of the Hill, were everywhere — north,
east and west — only rural environs and overlooks.
But if the peripatetic undergraduate had any eye for
sylvan beauty it must have lingered long on the thick
and grand trees of the Hillhouse forest, where oak,
walnut and maple reached their acme of girth, spread
and majestic stature. .The thinned and battered trees
of the tract today give small realism of what the Hill-
house Woods were then. A storm in 1893 felled a
hundred or more of the stately giants, and ten years
later another hundred fine hickories had fallen under
the ravages of the hickory beetle, which no devices of
forestry science could stay. It seems probable — at
least there are no records to prove otherwise — that
"Sachem's Wood," so called, with the remnant left,
was primeval forest; and there is logical inference that
in earlier times, perhaps not antedating much the nine-
teenth century, the unbroken forest reached up to the
base of Mill Rock.

"Highwood" was the early nineteenth century title
that the estate bore, changed to Sachem's Wood in
1838, a title by repute derived from famed Hillhouse,

HILLHOUSE AVENUE IN 1841

THE HILLHOUSE PLACE 23

Yale 1773, its first owner, and based on the likeness of
his face to that of the aboriginal race type.

The later records show that the inheritors from
James A. Hillhouse, widow and daughters, sold off
certain northward parts of the old estate; and the sur-
viving daughter by purchase and agreement with the
late Oliver F. Winchester was a party to Mr. Win-
chester's great gift of land for the Yale Obse/vatory,
a portion of which had been donated by the Hillhouse
family.

Its recent history is more familiar. The last heir,
James Hillhouse, '75, came into possession some five
years ago. A tentative plan of breaking up the fine
property into some hundred building lots was antici-
pated opportunely by its purchase for $510,000 by
Yale's representatives. Under the terms of the agree-
ment, Mr. Hillhouse is left in possession of the tract
of about three acres on which his home stands, with an
option for Yale should the reservation finally come
into the market; and a Sachem Street frontage of three
hundred feet is preserved for a public park, holding
the vista that reaches down Hillhouse Avenue.

Other provisions of the contract look to the use of
the estate of thirty acres for the Forest School, a
Botanical Garden, and School of Irrigation and for
fifty years exclude dormitories, baseball, golf and foot-
ball while conceding tennis and other limited games.
But these are mere details of the larger fact that has
conservated for the city a public park, contributed to
the City Beautiful and endowed Yale for long years to
come with ample space for educational elbow room.

V
THE PASSING OF TWO YALE HOSTELRIES

THE OLD PAVILION HOTEL

A local newspaper tells the tale of the demolition of
the structure on Collis and East Streets, once known
as the "Colonnade," almost, if not quite, the last of
the ancient structures at the head of the harbor that
had a local link with the Pavilion Hotel. The Colon-
nade's relation to the inn was more liquid than con-
crete. It was, in fact, but a bar room of local conven-
ience for the inn and said to be famous for its mint
juleps and by that token magnetic to the parental
Southerners who, with sons at Yale, came northward
o' summers to the Pavilion as New Haven's most acces-
sible shore resort. As such, the Pavilion, by fair infer-
ence, must have been a Yale resort also in days when
Dixie Land ubefo' de Wah" sent northward to Yale
her big delegation of undergraduates.

Some Yale greybeards of the fifties and a little
earlier must remember the Pavilion as it was then, a
stately, though not large, structure, big windowed, with
frontal pillars — after the Southern plantation type—
and thick walls plastered with rough yellow stucco.
Rows of big weeping willows flanked it and other trees
nearby gave it almost a sylvan environment. It stood,
perhaps, eighty feet back from the beach, up which the
tide, clearer then than in later times, rose twice a day
with its line for the bathers. And reaching out har-

THE OLD PAVILION HOTEL

PASSING OF TWO YALE HOSTELRIES 25

borward on the beach a long row of bathhouses and a
big boating wharf filled out the conception of a genuine
shore resort with realisms of salt water recreation.
For, indeed, almost all the strands of the harbor were
different then from now. The college student of the
fifties bathed in puris naturalibus upon a clean, sandy
shore, where now are the murky shops and engine
houses of the New Haven Railroad Company.

It was then, or a little earlier, that the Yale under-
graduate had a wider horizon on the harbor and more
alluring field of marine activity. Great open spaces
filled the arc of vision now subtended by the large
Sargent shops. Tomlinson's bridge was there with its
drawbridge, picturesque in its tumbledownness. Not
many Yale men, by the way, who cross that bridge now,
recall the fact that its iron rounded trusses years ago
were part of a "new" truss bridge of the New Haven
Railroad Company over the Housatonic River and are
now a monument to Yale scientific lore. It came about
thus : The railroad company some forty years ago had
just built the new iron bridge over the Housatonic to
replace an antique wooden structure. It was reckoned
not only mighty in strength but, in those days when
iron bridges were rare, and structural steel undreamt,
a veritable poem in beauty of beam and chord. Hardly
had its praises begun to die away when a young Senior
student of the Sheffield Scientific School, lured by its
fame, took it as the subject of his graduating thesis.
He demonstrated in startling fashion its structural
weakness and peril to passing trains. His figures went
to the railway experts, who confirmed them. The new
and beauteous bridge which had cost the corporation
many tens of thousands of dollars came down in a rush,
but not before it had also cost President G. H. Wat-

26 YALE YESTERDAYS

rous, Yale '53, lots of sleepless nights. A span of
the bridge of brief life, wrecked by Yale science, was
taken to be a part of the present Tomlinson. All which
is not tradition or legend, but a tale certified for fact
and within the writer's easy memory.

At the east end of Tomlinson's bridge, east side of
its approach, was the Yale boathouse, a small wooden
building with pigmy float, often swept from its moor-
ings by the late winter ice. But if the Yale boating
plant was more contracted than nowadays, the boating
itself was more recreative. Boating parties of students
more often pulled through the upper Quinnipiac
reaches or pushed up the mazy Mill River to the
Whitney dam; the waters were relatively clearer and
odorless before the days when New Haven sewers had
waxed big under the spur of Mayor "Harry" Lewis;
there were, to be sure, oyster stakes in river and har-
bor, for the fame of the Fair Haven "Dragon"
bivalve had not yet faded on the mollusk horizon. But
the stakes were not so obstructive and unsightly as in
later times, and Yale aquatics of the pure, sport-loving
order had in the harbor and its tributaries water areas
broad and winsome.

But the Pavilion had a much earlier tale. It was
built about 1800 by Kneeland Townsend — uncle of the
giver of the Yale Townsend Composition prizes — and
"Colonel" David Tomlinson, builder of Tomlinson's
bridge. These two owned the broad sand tracks in
that quarter of New Haven then called the "New
Township" and conceived an improvement scheme too
vast for its time. They leveled the big sand dunes;
planted trees and laid out the frontal Water Street;
and erected a group of villas with the Pavilion Hotel
near the center. The hotel itself, which, with lines

PASSING OF TWO YALE HOSTELRIES 27

of double-storied dormitories adjacent, had about
forty rooms, ere long became the shore resort of the
north coast of the Sound. Its earliest landlord was
one Porter, afterwards of the City Hotel, Hartford;
next came G. A. Ives, in later years host of the New
Haven House. Its owner, Judah Frisbie, next leased
it to an Englishman whose Irish and Roman Catholic
wife set up within it a chapel to her faith. And finally,
as a lowly tenement, it was bought by the Sargents
from the Frisbie heirs. The "Townsend and Tomlin-
son Folly," as the general venture was called in the
early century, was years ahead of its time and, in a
financial sense, failed dismally; but not until the
"Pavilion" had become a hostelry famous throughout
East and South; had entertained many big statesmen
of the nation, including Calhoun, Webster and Clay;
and had certified its beauty of site on a point of land —
later destroyed by the great filling to the Eastward —
whence the eye swept the vistas to the far horizon up
Mill River and the Quinnipiac.

The old Yale grad who now seeks the ancient open
spaces of the Pavilion hostelry and its region, then
respectably residential, will marvel at the change.
The old New Haven homes have been supplanted by
factory and tenement. The tree life of the streets is
gone or is tokened by a few sickly survivors. Italians
have replaced the natives. The original "Pavilion,"
after shifting downward to a squalid lodging house
itself, survived until a few years ago when swept away
by the factory of the Yale family of the Sargents. But
the greatest change, and one far from unpleasant, has
come to pass on the shore where the city has pushed
"made" land far out seaward, built up a recreative
park of several acres, and the baseball player now

28 YALE YESTERDAYS

sports over the bottoms where the guests of the Pavil-
ion, the college boys and the daughters of the South,
used to dive through the brine while the band on the
float attuned its old-fashioned melodies.

There came a later time when in the sixties the old
Pavilion beach twice a year became a Yale focal point
of sporting interest. There, in spring and autumn, was
the starting point of the Class boating races and later
still of the two big boating clubs, the "Glyuna" and
"Varuna," which in an aquatic sense were the rivals of
the two literary societies, Brothers in Unity and Lino-
nia, on the Campus — each club battling fiercely for the
greater membership and campaigning briskly among
the Freshmen. The official start was a few rods
directly in front of the Pavilion and the course a mile
or so southward on the harbor and return. A mighty
cluster of townspeople and Academics, of dandy under-
graduates and New Haven's best young womanhood —
in those days of the college vulgate dubbed "the snob,"
used to gather on the shore on those two gala days of
the year, and the rival shouts of "Glyuna" and "Var-
una" that greeted the outgoing and incoming race-
boats made the welkin echo like unto the vocal thun-
ders of the modern football gridiron.

The Pavilion is now but a remote memory and,
except for the written record, will ere long be a void.
Most of the Yale men who could testify to its sobrie-
ties and revelries have passed with it. Yet, before the
last vestige of it goes, too, may it not along with the
larger annals of the just extinct New Haven House
claim the reminiscent word?

PASSING OF TWO YALE HOSTELRIES 29

REMINISCENCES OF THE NEW HAVEN HOUSE

The old New Haven House, over which the swan
song of the (usually) good cheer of more than half a
century is now sung, has a symbolism in three direc-
tions. It is symbolic of Yale as being bought out in
part with Taft moneys and owning a more dignified
successor that will bear the Taft name; as a conserva-
tive old hostelry it has squared with the persistent Yale
tradition and policy; and lastly, in that same conserva-
tive temper, it has symbolized the city that has given
it its title. The New Haven House, in fact, as a going
concern was New Haven expressed in terms of brick,
mortar and stucco externally; and, internally, by a
regimen that excluded the elevator until a date com-
paratively recent in its structural life. It never was a
real hotel in even the later nineteenth century sense,
much less in the meaning of the first lustrum of the
twentieth. It was simply a huge tavern transplanted
from ancestral days to younger generations of guests.
But, if it lacked the up-to-date equipment and "go,"
it at least retained the old domesticity and informal
spirit. It appealed to the old fashions and habitudes,
and not in vain. Situation, size and proximity to Yale
did the rest and told — along with the sagacity of Land-
lord Moseley — the tale of prosperity.

But that prosperity had with it a side story in the
nature of a financial melodrama, with the late Augustus
R. Street, one of Yale's foremost benefactors, as its
victim. Mr. Street was a gentleman of high ancestry,
of culture, of hereditary wealth and a graduate of the
Yale Class of 1812, who built the New Haven House,
which was opened in 1851, though the official permit

30 YALE YESTERDAYS

for its erection bears a date of seven years earlier.
He was the veritable father of the Art School, which
in the early sixties he offered to the Yale corporation,
though, as his letter making the gift indicates, without
naming the sum. That was in the civil war days
(1864), with structural prices high and still soaring.
The Art School building, ambitiously conceived, the
first of its kind, it is said, to be connected with an
American university or college, far outran the esti-
mates and before it was done, Mr. Street found him-
self somewhat financially embarrassed in carrying out
his plans. He died in 1866, before the Art School was
finished, and left to Yale the New Haven House, not
long after sold by the Corporation to Mr. Moseley, at
a sum variously stated at from $60,000 to $80,000.
The total gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Street to Yale, includ-
ing Art, Academic and Theological professorships,
amounted to $411,337, of which $317,882 went to the
Art School. By the measure of money gifts, Mr.
Street, up to the time of his death, was far in front of
Yale's benefactors. There is a sense, therefore, in
which not only the Art School but the new hotel will be
his memorial.

Though renovated somewhat in its maturer age, and
boasting its standing wash basins and private tele-
phones, the mediaeval and antique New Haven House,
was, as stated, a kind of sublimated tavern with a
boarding-house aroma thrown in — yet, withal, not lack-
ing in traits of the neat and well-ordered home on which
the occasional rush of new guests came as a rude break.
Its menu was like unto the house — traditional and repe-
titious, yet of the "square meal" order, welcome to
transients or even to the guests of a week or fortnight,
but a bit monotonous to the long time boarder. It used

PASSING OF TWO YALE HOSTELRIES 31

to be said with a germ of truth that from the first of
January to the next new year, the bill of fare varied
but twice — shad in the spring, strawberries in summer.
The cooking was fair to good, but, by some occult influ-
ence, unvarying and uninfluenced by a change of chef.
Here, as a curio of the time, yet sure to be familiar to
former Yale guests, is the last Sunday bill of fare for
dinner — the last dinner, indeed, for the breakfast of
next day, Monday, October 17, 1910, closed the old
hostelry's life:

LUNCHES FOR AUTOMOBILE PARTIES PREPARED ON
SHORT NOTICE KINDLY GIVE ORDER TO HEAD WAITER

Blue Points Mock Turtle

Broiled Whitefish Maitre d'Hotel

Lettuce Sliced Tomatoes

Filet de Mignons Saute Jardiniere

Lamb Chops a la Legumes

Braised Saddle of Veal with Peas
Pineapple Sherbet
Roast Ribs of Beef au Jus

Roast Philadelphia Chicken Cranberry Sauce

Steamed Potatoes Boiled Rice Mashed Potatoes

Corn on Cob Boiled Onions Spinach

Salad Lorette

Cottage Pudding Sauce Sabayon
Apple Pie Macaroons Lemon Custard Pie

Lady Fingers Wine Jelly

Coffee Ice Cream Meringue a la Cream

Assorted Fruit

Bent's Water Crackers Cheese and Crackers

English Breakfast and Oolong Tea Demi-Tasse

APOLLINARIS, BOTTLES OR JUGS, QTS., .40, PINTS, .25, SPLITS, IN BOTTLES, .15

Sunday, October 16, 1910.

32 YALE YESTERDAYS

Expunge a few — very few — of the entrees; cut out
the Gallic and the reference to automobile parties and
apollinaris; and simplify type and paper, and the menu
above may almost be antedated by decades without
change.

Even while he smiles, the Yale graduate, old or
young, sees the familiar corner darkened by night and
the New Haven House about to die, not without a
touch of sadness. With it perishes, not, strictly speak-
ing, a Yale institution, but one so closely inwoven with
academic memories that it has been a kind of big dor-
mitory off the Campus — a spot where hosts of Yale
men through the winged years have gathered; where
Campus memories have been exchanged and deepened;
where college functions and interests could hardly
have centered more had the house been formally Yalen-
sian; and whose going now attests not only a New
Haven but a Yale in transition — a transition upwards
yet not without its subnote of pathos as The Old goes
and The New comes in.

VI
THE TWILIGHT OF ALUMNI HALL

The sub-Freshman who, half a century ago, passed
behind the Old Brick Row and with cold feet and
vibrant nerves went toward Alumni Hall for his
entrance examination, saw a structure not outwardly
different from what it is now — but a structure far
ahead of its present status in the admiration and
approval of that college generation. It was then the
newest building on the Old Campus; it was, except the
Library, the only college structure built of stone; and
architectural authority as well as laical taste favored
its castellated design and even made allowances for the
wooden capwork that certified to exhaustion of funds
rather than defective artistic judgment. It was argued
in the way of historical fitness that the mediaeval castle
had not seldom sheltered learning as well as the robber
baron. And as the same mediaeval stronghold had its
identity with dungeon, rack and thumbscrew, the under-
graduate, less in love with the Hall, could readily span
the void of fancy and fit the academic castle to the
mental tortures of examination — especially the hated
and dreaded "biennials," covering two full years of
the curriculum of the time and on which so many an
undergraduate bark went to wreck.

Alumni Hall is not only the last material relic on
the Old Campus of the big open societies, but also of
the revered President Woolsey, who drew the original

34 YALE YESTERDAYS

plans. It was about the middle of the last century that
some building of the kind became imperative for col-
lege needs. A large hall was required for the biennial
examinations, when a whole class met together, and the
torture room must be ample enough for separative
spaces between the victims; a large hall was needed
also for alumni meetings; and the two big societies,
Linonia and Brothers in Unity, then not far from their
heyday, craved improved meeting rooms, while the
lesser society, Calliope, wanted a room, too. All three
societies contributed funds for the structure, but as the
Calliope died before it was built, her contribution was
returned to the donors. The Hall, begun in 1852 and
finished a year later, cost in round numbers $27,000, of
which Linonia gave $5,800, Brothers in Unity $5,500,
and the College gave or got the remaining $15,700,
which, if the wooden finishings on the stonework are
due evidence, must have been hard cash at the end. In
our times the building would probably cost two or three
times what was paid for it fifty-six years ago. As a
unique architectural distinction, the large lower hall
was in those days said to be the greatest in the country
without internal pillars.

Had the open societies lived, Alumni Hall would
have quite fulfilled its useful prognosis ; and though they
became moribund a dozen years later and have now
dropped far below the Yale horizon of the past, the
Hall, though it is to die comparatively young, is old
enough to own its memories.

Foremost in the annals of the Hall and dominant in
its memories are the college examinations, reaching
down to this day with their unwritten tales of tragedy,
comedy, joy and woe, of trickery on the one hand that
sought to dodge or mitigate the ordeal and, on the

THE TWILIGHT OF ALUMNI HALL 35

other, the staunch and honest scholarship that faced it.
Elective studies now break up and scatter the examina-
tions and subdivide the examined into groups of which
the big hall is needed only for the larger few. But
fifty years ago, and for three decades after that, each
class, for the awful biennials or not much less awesome
annuals, was hived in Alumni Hall under conditions of
scrutiny which, if reports of the graduate greybeards
are true, rivalled the watch and ward of the cardinals
at a papal election. It used to be a tradition, probably
untrue, that the octagonal tables, originally square,
were sawed off as to their corners and octagonized so
that the corners might not cover the hidden "crib."
However that may be, it is certain that the examination
agonies and glooms of those college times centered in
the Hall where the portraits of the college benefactors
looking down from the walls seemed redolent of the
Spanish Inquisition and Torquemada. With its dull-
hued panellings and massive effects, the Hall has indeed
offered little aesthetic and visual relief to the chief of
its solemn functions.

But with a brief trip upstairs, college memory shifts
from a penseroso to cheery allegro. There was fun
and lots of it in the society halls, the excitement of
acute campaign rivalry, and both tempered by good
debating that trained many a Yale man to public fame.
Afterwards, even if regular debating had perished and
the societies, as such, had lapsed into desuetude, there
were the society prize debates; the humors of the
"Statement of Facts"; and, for many years, on the
Tuesday night before Thanksgiving and held year by
year rotatively in each of the society halls was the
"Thanksgiving Jubilee," an institution which, perhaps,

36 YALE YESTERDAYS

more than any other at Yale, caught the Campus spirit
of wit and harmless prankery.

The Jubilee, as stated, came just before the college
break-up of three days for the Thanksgiving vacation,
when the Freshman was keyed up by his first visit home
and, more conservatively, the other classes shared his
joys of hope. In these sublimated mental conditions,
the Freshmen were made to pay the Jubilee's cost. For
two or three weeks before the show, the upperclass-
men's hat went round among the college neophytes
and they were furnished with tickets on the face
entitling them to front seats. The joke came when the
Freshmen, after a long wait at the front entrance of
the Hall, were admitted only to be greeted by the jeers
of the upperclassmen and Sophomores, who, going up
quietly the back way — without tickets — had crowded
the Hall, secured every seat and left the Freshmen, as
ultimate consumer, only scant standing room in the
rear. This was the first "opening load," so called.
The second was the "measurements" for President and
Vice President of the Jubilee. The Freshmen were
ordered summarily to pass up to the stage their longest
and shortest man. After applying to the longest a
mighty measuring stick, the long man's meter was offi-
cially announced as "Two hundred and forty degrees
Fahrenheit" or similar skit, while the short man was
reported as "Kneehimiah." Next, the two Freshman
officials were hustled back over the heads of the audi-
ence to the rearward Freshman zone.

Followed next the Jubilee "sermon," usually deliv-
ered by a bright Senior who had spent on it consider-
able midnight oil. The "sermon" in the later sixties —
and some other features of the show — had dropped in
delicacy to a point which conditioned a Faculty censor

THE TWILIGHT OF ALUMNI HALL 37

behind the scenes; and if, as not seldom came to pass,
the preacher in some joke too broad was called from
the stage or a too redolent farce was checked midway,
the audience knew what it meant. Female parts were
early interdicted by the Faculty; and an announcement
on the program that the Faculty having shut off female
characters, the committee had "been forced to fee
males instead" — expressed on the stage by males in
hybrid garb — pretty nearly wrecked the Jubilee. For
the rest, the Jubilee was a jolly vaudeville in an aca-
demic setting — three hours or more of a much-mixed
program of negro minstrelsy, original or parodied
farce, song, dance, ustunt" and "skit" in which college
individual talent had its full play and now and then a
hit was made which for a time bade fair to be a Campus
classic.

The after story and later annals of Alumni Hall are
recent enough in time to be recalled by most of the
younger Yale generations. The old society halls, sub-
divided into classrooms, have reflected the more som-
ber realisms of the big hall below; the big hall itself,
after serving for many years for the phantom Com-
mencement dinner, has contracted its uses to examina-
tions, to the alumni gathering on Commencement
Week's Tuesday and to an occasional university mass
meeting; and, as an unsightly and inharmonious fea-
ture of the architectural Campus, filling precious land
space, Alumni Hall now enters its twilight, soon to give
way to the new dormitory which the Old Campus
craves for reasons utilitarian, social and financial.
The Hall will not go down among many tears, for its
memories, in the main, have been, like its outer form,
sinister. But it has had a kind of sub-halo as a
memento of the superb drill in debate of the great open

38 YALE YESTERDAYS

societies of the past and of the wholesome college
mirth which from their two halls has echoed down the
Yale years and which her old grads still greet with a
reminiscent smile.

CAMPUS TRADITIONS, CUSTOMS AND
CHARACTERS

I

THE BURIAL OF EUCLID

The nomenclature through which Prospect Street
has passed certifies its old rural quality with such titles
remembered as "Second Quarter Road," "Smith Ave-
nue," "Prospect Lane," "Tutor's Lane" and probably
others obscured by time. And it was, doubtless, this
bucolic and woodsy quality, lending itself to weird,
nocturnal lights and shades — joined with reasonable
nearness to the Campus — which made the region for
a long series of years the scenario of the College farce-
tragedy dubbed the Burial of Euclid.

Just where on Tutor's Lane the great geometrician,
as reincarnated on the printed page and signalized
more specifically by such diagrams of his as the Pons
Asinorum and the more refractory "Devil's Wheel-
barrow," had his annual interment is not definitely
fixed; nor with unfenced woods fringing the Lane is it
likely that the undergraduates, some of them none the
better for liquid tonics, were fastidious and exacting
in selecting a burial lot. But the most authentic legends
fix the spot of cremation and burial at about the site
of the present Infirmary. It matters not much. Yet
in passing, one may note the impressive mutation of
time which finds Prospect Street, once the retired
scene of an undergraduate orgy, become now the direc-
tion of Yale's most solid physical growth. Metaphori-
cally, the bones of Euclid have become the seeds of
University development.

42 YALE YESTERDAYS

The Burial, that so long held its place in the Yale
undergraduate calendar, had its psychological birth in
the old-fashioned student hatred of required mathe-
matics. The mathematics in themselves were what the
student of today would term a "snap" course and
hardly beyond the curriculum of the up-to-date prep
school, while a Yale Freshman now of very ordinary
gifts would deem Euclid almost alphabetical. But that
mathematics, and especially Sophomore mathematics,
were the student bugbear through most of the last cen-
tury and even into the later seventies all the contem-
poraneous readings prove. There was a veritable
uWar of the Conic Sections" in the Class of 1827,
stirred by a classroom disagreement with a tutor in
which half the class refused to recite, were suspended
by the Faculty and were at last "brought to book"
only by parental authority. In the list of rebels ap-
pears so eminent a name as that of Horace Bushnell.
But that mathematical mutiny dims before the rebel-
lion in the Class of 1832, originating likewise in a
classroom dispute with the instructor over the form of
recitation. In the sequel forty-four out of a class of
ninety-five were dismissed from the College, of whom
a large proportion never were enrolled in the graduate
list. The mathematical ghost, prior to the elective
period at Yale beginning in 1884, when the specter
was exorcised, stalks constantly in song and legend
through the undergraduate life of that old time. It
was on the mathematical rock in the biennial, and,
later, annual exams that many an undergraduate bark
shivered; it was the mathematical paper that was ever
the objective of conspiracy, fraud and bribery to
secure; and the burial of the text-book was but an

THE BURIAL OF EUCLID 43

expression of the conventional undergraduate attitude
toward mathematics in general with poor Euclid as its
personal emblem.

Many of the details of the annual celebration are
lost from the records, but most of the generalities sur-
vive or can be rescued from the printed programs.
In its earliest phases, dating far back in the nineteenth
century, the Burial appears to have taken place in the
winter or late autumn, and to have had a prefix. In the
prefix, the Sophomore divisions met together to cele-
brate Euclid's academic death and gloat over his corse.
He was perforated with a red hot poker, each man in
turn thrusting the iron through his covers — symboliz-
ing the fact that each had "gone through" Euclid.
Then he was held upward and the class passed below,
indicating, with doubtful verity, that he was "under-
stood." Next each man passed the volume underfoot
to prove that Euclid had been ugone over." These
ceremonials were but preliminary to the Burial, which
came later. Sometimes it took the form of a meeting —
attended apparently by the whole undergraduate body
—in one of the New Haven halls. Or it might be a
march direct to the woods on Tutor's Lane. But in
either case, there was a funeral sermon, original odes —
apt to be in Latin — a dirge, prayer, torchlights, gro-
tesque garbs, a funeral pyre with overlooking demons,
a grave for the deceased, cremation and burial with
the normal accessories of derisive song, howls and per-
vasive undergraduate racket. The lighted procession,
moving from the Green northward, was, of course, the
Euclidean piece de resistance, a thing of delight for the
town spectators of both sexes and all ages and a spec-
tacular event of the year. The old programs indi-

44 YALE YESTERDAYS

cate that the mortuary ceremonies were of a rather pro-
tracted character, reaching into the small hours and
that the Chapel benches next morning must have had
a thin crop.

Sometimes the Greek mathematician appears to
have been simulated by an actual human effigy in classic
garb, bearing on breast or in hand the hated volume.
But usually the volume itself was carried within a small
coffin at the head of the procession with its escort of
funeral torchlights.

On its artistic side the Orgies of the Burial are
depicted in a cartoon indefinite as to date, of large
dimensions and lurid atmosphere, a yeasty compound
of fire and fury, yet bristling with detail. Jupiter —
or somebody like him — sits aloft, presiding genius of
the fiery energies below. In the midfield is the coffin
mounted on blazing tar barrels with supervising demon
stokers. On the right is the mystic symbol of a terri-
fied dog "going some," tail 'twixt legs. In lower right-
hand angle is the portrait of somebody with no attempt
at caricature, apparently a contemporaneous instructor
in mathematics, while in the left-hand angle a profes-
sorial figure, book in hand, bears a striking likeness to
President Woolsey. A despairing, half-naked student
with face of richest gloom shares the lower foreground
with a weeping Crocodile. Demons embattled and
rampant students on hobby horses, a dim forest back-
ground, fill in a picture on which the draftsman must
have stayed up enough hours to master half the prob-
lems of the flaming text-book.

The program of the Class of '55 for the burial, in
November, 1852, runs substantially as follows:

THE BURIAL OF EUCLID 45

BURIAL OF EUCLID
Order of Exercises

1. Music.

2. Salutationis Carmen — in lingua Latina.

3. Music.

4. Oration.

5. Song.

6. Poem.

7. Procession to Grave.

8. Prayer at Grave.

9. Song.

10. Procession from Grave.

This condensed order is developed in the body of
the program, as follows:

1. Overture — Go to the Devil and shake yourself.

2. Salutationis Carmen — By the Valedictorian.

3. Romanza — Old Grimes is dead — by the Home Blenders.

4. Oration — How are the mighty fallen — by Lord North's

practical speaker.

5. Song, Air — "O Pueri me Circumferte" — by How-are-

you-now.

6. Hell Regained — by Hon. Thomas Cat, Jr.

7. Defiling Procession to the Grave, the Home Blenders

playing, "Are We Almost There?"

8. Prayer at the Grave, with closing observations — by a

talented Theolog.

9. Dirge — Air, "Auld Lang Syne" — by the Lean Muse.
10. Friends of the Family, and others, return in procession

of the equinoxes.

More elaborate is the program of the Class of '57
at the burial of November 8, 1854:

46 YALE YESTERDAYS

BURIAL OF EUCLID

BY THE
CLASS OF '57

Order of Procession

1. Band-itti.

2. Physician and Priest.
. 3. Undertaker.

4. Bearers (cut of coffin) Bearers.

5. Chief Mourners.

Madame Euclid.
Miss Anna Lytics.

attended by
Mr. D. A. Revised.
Faculty and Fresh.

6. Friends of the deceased.

Developed thus in the body of the program:

1. Overture, from Bob the Devil.

2. Introductory Ode, by Major Natur Caput.

3. Music by the Ban (d) jo.

4. Oration (De) Cease (of) Rude Bore-us, by a member

of the Bore(a)ed.

5. Music, Solow on the Triangle.

6. Funeral Sermon, by Moses in the Chapel Rushes.

7. Song, Time, "Skool," "Skool."

8. Procession at the funeral pyre.

9. Prayer at the Grave by Rt. Rev. U. B. Damned.

10. Dirge by Asoph O. More.

11. Incantation by Hon. Sir Cumference.

12. Ad Urbem fugiamus, "Hellward he wends his weary

way."

There are naturally punning personalities running
through the years at the various burials. Thus the
Class of 1858 had music by the harp — (i.e.)s; A dis-
course by Double L. Dee; "Child Mourners" Ana
Tommy and Theo. Dolite; and the parade was
ordered in "Geometrical Progression" by a Parallel of

THE BURIAL OF EUCLID 47

Pipe(d)s, while the salutatory ovation was assigned to
(D)Arn — old Latin Prose. The Class of 1859 nad a
poem by A. Rhum boy (d), a discourse by General
Proportion and as mourners Aunty Cedent, Geo.
Metry and Cora Lary. The Class of 1860 boasted a
discourse by a tan(d) gent, and a poem, "Mysteries
of Paris," by Helen, while friends of the deceased
were Parent Hesis, Theo. Rem, Polly Gon and C.
Cant.

So far as can be found, only two copies of the
Euclidean sermons remain in print. They are of rather
diluted wit, bristling with indifferent puns and the long-
est of the two dwelling on Euclid's birth, relations with
the other sex, courtship and honeymoon in terms that
in these days would be quickly expunged from under-
graduate print and have brought to wreck the later
Thanksgiving jubilees. But the rest of the literature
averages better; and there is noteworthy among the
prose products a Latin prayer opening thus :

O rex inexorabilis, illacrymabilis Manium dicte Pluto, qui atro
Cocyto, Acheronte, Pyriphlegethonteque tristes foraminum um-
bras
Semper compescis hanc nostrum obsecrationem audi.

and the text of a sermon of the Class of '52 reads:

"When a straight line standing on another straight
line makes the adjacent angles equal to one another
each of these angles is called a three and a half and the
line thus placed is called a rush."

RHYMES OF THE BURIAL

In the poetry of the Burial, the Sophomore Muse
flew frequently if not high, much affecting the Latin —

48 YALE YESTERDAYS

suggesting, for one thing, closer familiarity of the
undergraduate with that tongue then than now. Here
is an excerpt from a one-hundred line poem of the
Class of '44:

When first in thy swaddling clothes, puny and weak

The lips of thine infancy essayed to speak
And a parent bent o'er thee all eager to hear

A mother's fond title breathed forth in her ear
How she started amazed and her heart sank away

For angle and angle was all thou couldst say.
They brought for thee playthings and toys by the score

But still with thy fingers at work on the floor
Thou seemed drawing figures all deeply in thought

While playthings and baubles were scorned and forgot.

Propositions and problems and squares were thy song
Which, waking or sleeping still dwelt on thy tongue.

From the dirge of the Class of '53 comes this:

Black curls the smoke above the pile

And snaps the crackling fire ;
The joyful shouts of Merry Sophs

With wails and groans conspire.
May yells more fiendish greet thy ears,

And flames yet hotter glow ;
May fiercer torments rack thy soul

In Pluto's realms below.

A burial song of the Class of '54 ends with this
stanza :

No more we gaze upon that board

Where oft our knowledge failed,
As we its mystic lines ignored,

On cruel points impaled.
We're free ! Hurrah ! from Euclid free !

Farewell, Misnamed Playfair.
Farewell, thou Worthy Tutor B,

Shake hands and call it square.

THE BURIAL OF EUCLID 49

Mr. Playfair was the editor of the then orthodox
edition of Euclid. The next extract is from the dirge
of the Class of '55:

Old Euk is nicely caged at last,

He's fairly in a box.
Hurrah ! Hurrah ! We've got him fast

In spite of the old fox.

CHORUS

Then lay him in his hole, my boys,
We've made him shroud and shrive,

Wretch ne'er had fairer dole, my boys,
Than "Euk" from Fifty Five.

Sophomore bombast wings itself high in these lines
at the Burial of 1850:

Lo! Euclid yields! the unconquered hero bends
Lowers his proud crest and to the tomb descends !

While in his victor, bathed in dust and gore,
Behold ! Behold ! the mighty Sophomore.

And here are mortuary rhymes of other Classes

Thou must survey inhospitable tracts

And find the horizontal parallax.
Oft we with his curved triangles

Found ourselves in quite a fix.

Now his lines he takes to Hades

He'll try angling in the Styx.

But know ye wretched Freshmen
That Euclid is not dead.

He is not dead but sleepeth
Upon Lethean bed.

50 YALE YESTERDAYS

If he be dead to Sophomores

He is not dead to you,
Long shall he live, Long shall he live

To fizzle Sixty Two.

We'll make his antiquated face
Far less than any given space
Extract his root and square his base.

The Burial died with the Class of '63, the victim
apparently of a reform movement aimed at its extrava-
gances. The class had a mild celebration, but the next
class ('64) dropped a custom that must have reached
to a Yale antiquity very remote — for as early as 1843,
it was referred to as "handed down from time imme-
morial." A greater mystery is how and why the Spar-
tan Faculty of those days permitted it to live with its
reflections on authority, its lurid racket and its lapses
into sacrilegious and prurient speech. From the present
viewpoint it might be reasoned that it was a safety
valve through which the undergraduate engine let off
steam. But that was a breadth of vision to which the
ancestral Faculty never expanded.

II

TOWN AND GOWN RIOTS

In the copious diary of President Ezra Stiles of
Yale, under date of September 4, 1782, appears the
following entry, perhaps the earliest official record of
trouble between town and gown of New Haven.

A great Contest has arisen between Young Sirs and Col-
legians on one side and Gentlemen in town, chiefly of Academic
Education, and some Merchants on the other. It has been
customary for those who graduated at Commencement to have
a Ball in the State House the evening following and invite
their Friends and Relations — this produced a promiscuous
Assembly. The Gentlemen of the Town are desirous of a
politer Ball for Gentlemen of the Army and other Strangers
and claimed the Courthouse. Half a dozen Bachelors of Arts
residing in Town chiefly and not in College joyned in a separa-
tion from their College Brethren & among the rest Sir who

spake with less delicacy than was prudent upon the Candidates
and their Company. This excited the resentment of all Col-
lege. On Monday night last the Undergraduates in disguise
took him under the College pump, — an high Indignity to any
& especially towds a Graduate. He, instead of entering a
Complaint to the College Authority complained to the Grand
Jury & obtained a Presentment; & also brot an Action at
Common Law for 1000 Pounds Damages.

The foregoing was not as appears a strictly town
and gown trouble. It was a broil of undergraduates
with New Haven's 400 rather than with her submerged
tenth. But it suggests the pugnacious temper of the
undergraduate body which could thus "take under the
pump" a Yale man certified by his sheepskin. If such

52 YALE YESTERDAYS

was their even fortuitous attitude to an older Yale
kinsman, what must have been their normal posture
toward a genuine and aggressive utownie"?

During those closing decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury, local conditions were peculiarly hospitable to town
and gown feuds and frays. When New Haven was
made a city in 1784, the whole township — by the next
census of 1790 — contained but 4,484 inhabitants, the
city itself probably several hundred fewer and the Col-
lege in relation to the town stood in much larger socio-
logical ratio than now. This alone would not have
made the city a town and gown arena. But New
Haven was also a seaport where Jack Tar of the Eng-
lish, Spanish and Portuguese breed sported freely
'tween voyages; and his excursions to Chapel Street
bearing an overloaded cargo of rum brought him in
so frequent collision with the Yale student — himself
not always painfully sober — that the annals of the time
recall the asperities of town and gown in Oxford as
depicted in English literature. To that period and
the early part of the nineteenth century belong the
"defense committee" of undergraduates, formed nomi-
nally, year after year, to oppose the attacks of the
mariners, but also, it may be plausibly suspected, with
offensive proclivities of its own on occasion; and an
outcome still later was the "bully" system, with its
class bullies, major and minor, who, along with the
historical annex of the "bully club," have been too
often written about to need description here.

As the city grew and the visiting sailors segregated
themselves more and more at their shady resorts near
the "Head of the Wharf," the contests of the seamen
and undergraduates visibly diminish until there comes
a brief period of town and gown truce, when the lights

TOWN AND GOWN RIOTS 53

of local war history burn dim. But a new war soon
follows between the academic body and the volunteer
fire companies. The latter, in New Haven, appear to
have been a pretty harum-scarum lot, drawn, as a rule,
from the lower middle group of young citizens, loyal
to their hand-engine and to nothing else, and quick at
fisticuffs.

Just when and why the new warfare began are ob-
scure points. But it is certain that it fills a large place
in town and gown annals during the early middle dec-
ades of the last century. The first real outbreak in
riot was October 30, 1841, when the city fire depart-
ment had its parade, with the usual accompaniments of
rival tests in throwing water against the spire of Center
Church. At the same time the undergraduates were
having a game of football on the Green. The hose
lay invitingly across the ball ground, was trodden on by
the students, the free and full play of water checked,
and, after hard words by both sides, the firemen seized
the ball. A small riot followed in which three stu-
dents were arrested, escorted to a justice of the peace
by a mixed and boisterous crowd of students and fire-
men, the usual bail given and the trial adjourned.
That evening at midnight the students attacked the
engine house on High Street — lineal predecessor of
the present Yale carpentry shop — drove away the
watchman, shattered the engine, cut the hose and flung
the sections over the college yard. The fire bells were
rung and an angry crowd of students and citizens
gathered, but the Faculty and city officers quelled the
incipient riot.

In the spring of 1854 was the most serious riot in
New Haven town and gown records, in Homan's
Theater, then a part of what is now the Exchange

54 YALE YESTERDAYS

Building, at the corner of Church and Chapel Streets.
A popular English actor, named Plunkett, and his wife
were playing a tragedy, "Fazio, or The Italian Wife,"
which was drawing large audiences. At the perform-
ance on the evening of March 16, and in one of the
interludes, a comic Irish singer got too many recalls
from a crowd of firemen in the gallery to suit the taste
of a body of students in the orchestra chairs. The
chairs hissed the gallery and the gallery hissed the
chairs, but this disturbance quieted down until the close
of the performance, when the firemen, aided by a num-
ber of longshoremen, had a set-to with the students on
the sidewalk. The police then took a hand and haled a
number of the fighters to police headquarters, where
"Pat" O'Neill, a longshoreman, was put under $300
bonds to keep the peace, and the rest discharged. The
affair, of course, roused a fever of excitement on the
Campus, and the next night about one hundred and
fifty of the students bought tickets to the floor of the
theater and attended in a body to "see the thing
through." They sat quietly enough through the play,
but in the interludes were the targets of abuse and an
occasional missile from the gallery. Meanwhile, the
fire bells had been rung in the city and a great mob of
roughs had gathered on Chapel Street bent on mischief.
Just at the close of the performance, the city chief of
police met the Yale boys, told them of the situation
outside and advised that they go out by the back door,
"keep together" in a solid body and march up Chapel
Street to the Campus as quickly as possible.

The students took his advice, went out in close order
and, in ranks of four, began their rapid march up
Chapel Street amid the yells and din of the mob. But
there was nothing worse than yells until just opposite

TOWN AND GOWN RIOTS 55

Trinity Church, where a high board fence brought out
the figures of the marchers in bold relief in the clear
moonlight; and, unluckily, just at that juncture, the
raising of the "Gaudeamus" song of the collegians was
probably interpreted by the mob as a defiance. A
fusillade of bricks and stones followed from the mob
and two or three pistol shots from the students. Just
then Pat O'Neill, who was an active and noisy leader
of the rioters, seized John Sims, '54, of Mississippi,
who was last in the Yale line, and tried to pull him
back into the mob. At this focal point of the tragedy,
the stories diverge. As one narrator has it, O'Neill
struck Sims twice with an iron bar; as another tells
the story, O'Neill tried to choke Sims and pull him
backward into the crowd. Sims met the assault by
drawing a bowie knife and stabbing O'Neill through
the side to the heart. The rioter fell dead, the mob
gathered in silence around the body and the students
went on to the college yard.

But the silence of the mob was short-lived. Its
anger burst forth in new shouts and fury, the fire bells
clanged out anew and a great gathering of the worst
elements of the city massed on College Street before
South College, pelting the ancient structure with brick-
bats and stones. The mob broke into the Armory,
drew out two cannon, loaded them heavily with chain
and stones and levelled them at Old South. The mayor
of the city had read the riot act from the college fence,
but the mob cried "Bring out the murderer," and re-
fused to disperse. Meanwhile the Yale forces had not
been idle. Almost every undergraduate had entered
South or South Middle, the blinds were shut upon the
windows, the doors barricaded, and munitions of war
gathered. Judge Howland, '54, qul pars fuit, has told

56 YALE YESTERDAYS

in print how President Woolsey appeared on the scene
and ordered the boys to keep quiet unless attacked, but
in that case "to defend yourselves to the best of your
ability," and there is a tradition that Prof. "Tommy"
Thacher aided the college boys in moulding bullets
behind the academic breastworks. There were lively
and critical times at the cannon, which the mob tried
over and over again to fire. But, as the faded page
of one of the contemporary newspapers relates: "Cap-
tain Bissell, of the police, managed to keep possession
of one of the guns while other citizens took charge of
the other, and they prevented the horrors which would
have resulted from the discharge of either, for the con-
tents would probably have passed through the buildings
into the dwellings of citizens." The mob yelled for
an hour or two longer, then slowly broke up and the
historic riot ended. But for a week no collegian dared
at nights to go outside the Campus. It is recorded
that one of the cannon was loaded so heavily that it
burst when discharged later.

A coroner's investigation followed before a jury of
twelve, among whose names are to be read those of
so well-remembered citizens as Morris Tyler, Willis
Bristol, Caleb Mix, Samuel Bishop and George Hoad-
ley, with Philip S. Galpin as foreman. Sims, who had
lost his hat, bearing his name, in the fray with O'Neill,
hired legal counsel, who advised him and his college
mates to refuse to testify on the technical ground of
self-incrimination for taking part in a riot. The news-
paper account of the hearing is, therefore, little more
than a dry record of refusals to answer, if we except,
perhaps, a statement of Professor Larned that "long
since (in the Faculty) the principle of compelling stu-
dents to inform on one another has been abandoned as

TOWN AND GOWN RIOTS 57

wholly ineffectual." But the case was clear enough
against O'Neill, who, as the jury found, "came to his
death at the hands of a person or persons to us un-
known— the said Patrick O'Neill being at the time
engaged in leading, aiding and abetting a riot." Partly
as a result of the tragedy, Sims left College in his
Senior year. He served in the Confederate Army as
surgeon with rank of major during the Civil War and
was killed just after the battle of Cedar Creek.

Not less tragic but more distinctly a firemen's riot
and more mystic in its sequels was the battle of col-
legians with the firemen in 1858. Its exciting causes
were simple. A New Haven fire company had its
house in what is now the Yale carpentry shop on High
Street, near Alumni Hall. Just above at the corner of
Elm Street was a Yale "joint," called the "Crocodile"
eating club. Ever since the riot of 1854, there had
been ill feeling between the firemen and students,
which had slowly intensified. One of its most flaming
local points was the High Street engine house, past
which the "Crocodiles" marched defiantly night after
night singing "Gaudeamus." The old feud came to a
head when the "Crocodiles," on the night of February
8, 1858, passing the engine house, were greeted with
a shower of mingled water and stones. A parley fol-
lowed which was but a stratagem of the firemen to
gain time, while one of their number went for rein-
forcements. These presently appeared in a troop of
firemen dashing up from Chapel Street. Then the
spokesman of the firemen in the overture, one William
Miles, armed with a hose wrench, threw off the mask
and called for an attack. In the riot that followed,
several pistol shots were fired and Miles fell with a
wound from which he died two days later. The fire-

5$ YALE YESTERDAYS

men retreated to their house as soon as their leader
went down. A period of intense excitement followed
with "town" threats of violence against the college
buildings and students, and measures of self-defense
by the undergraduates.

An investigation by the grand jury followed. The
students summoned adopted the precedent of 1854 in
refusing to testify on the ground of self-incrimination.
This time the presiding justice took the law in his own
hands and signed a mittimus committing to jail one of
the Yale witnesses. The students hired as his counsel
Henry B. Harriman, Yale '46, and Charles R. Inger-
soll, Yale '40 — each to be afterwards Governor of
Connecticut — and the student was promptly released
by a writ of habeas corpus. Next came the appeal
heard by Chief Justice Storrs, a name luminous in the
annals of the Connecticut bench, who, after a long
hearing in a crowded court, rendered a decision up-
holding the student in his refusal to testify. There
the case ended, save an immense output of literature on
both sides, and sharp criticism by the local press on the
secrecy of the grand jury investigation, from which
the public had been excluded and which was denounced
as smacking of the Spanish inquisition.

"Who killed Miles?" was a question involving a
mystery which has been discussed to this day by the
later Yale generations. Oddly enough, for years a
prominent Southerner of the Class of '59, still living,
was named, but wrongly, as has been proved. Ac-
cording to another legend, the fatal shot was reduced
to one of two men, one of whom many years later
exculpated himself to a prominent professor, thus fix-
ing the crime upon the other. But the tale is foggy, the
mystery remains unsolved, and will doubtless continue

TOWN AND GOWN RIOTS 59

so to the end. As several pistols were fired in the dark-
ness, perhaps the student who fired the fatal shot never
was sure of it himself.

Looking back from our viewpoint, the epoch of the
firemen's riots of town and gown with their twin trage-
dies seems due mainly to two immediate causes. One
was the stupidity of the city fathers in locating an
engine house right on the edge of the Campus, pre-
cisely where it was most likely to foment a broil. A
second promoting cause was the persistent custom of
the students in singing through the streets and not
always in classic words or tune. The singing marked
the students down and seems gradually to have become
interpreted by the rough "townies" as a note of chal-
lenge and defiance. Certainly, the newspapers of the
time repeatedly refer to its provocative quality and it
hardly seems a mere coincidence that the good old
song "Gaudeamus" should have been the death note
in two town and gown tragedies.

Ill

OLD TROUBLES IN COMMONS

The erection of Yale's great dining hall, in a sense,
may be said to set the seal of approval of the Yale
authorities of the twentieth century on the gastronomic
wisdom of the founders two hundred years ago. The
latter deemed the old "Commons" almost as much an
essential and integral part of the "learned education"
as a text-book or moral discipline. The new Com-
mons, with its costly modern plant, makes the old
policy institutional and at once fixes and repeats his-
tory. It also repeats history by being born with an
opening chapter of student asperities over the quality
of the food.

The general story of the Yale Commons through
the eighteenth century reads like a wild nightmare fol-
lowing a bad meal. And there were reasons for it,
based on human nature. In the first place, Commons
was compulsory, a fact of itself enough to make it a
target of undergraduate feeling. It was a kind of vent
hole through which all the grievances of the student
life frothed. Were there a new and "hard" study
imposed, or a case of sharp discipline for student
pranks in Chapel or a revolt against an unpopular
instructor, they were pretty sure to be connoted in "dis-
orders" at the Commons with a byplay of broken
crockery and jests levelled at the food. So when we
read that a choral BeBaa, second perfect indicative of
Baivw, greeted a dish at the Commons, it is not neces-

OLD TROUBLES IN COMMONS 61

sarily to be inferred that too antique mutton was
dressed lamb fashion; or, if a placque of eighteenth
century butter flattened itself against the Commons
ceiling, that it had been churned in the age of Pythag-
oras or disinterred by Schliemann.

But the acrimony, which rises constantly, like an
uneasy ghost, in the story of the early Commons and
punctuates so often the faded pages of the Stiles diary,
had, after all, a firmer base than undergraduate restive-
ness. Board was about one dollar a week, which
implied a menu that even in the eighteenth century
could not have been satisfying for the stomach, how-
ever ascetic. Thus, for example, meat was theoreti-
cally prescribed once a day; but the records show that
twice a week in summer time it could be commuted for
salt pork. Cider — succeeding earlier and very tenuous
beer — was passed around from mouth to mouth in a
large pewter dipper. Plain bread seems to have been
the veritable staff of life at breakfast, and apple pie,
in a period when New England orchards were prolific,
figures at meals with dismal monotony. Noting this
dominance of the apple in the Yale official diet of the
time, one marvels that the Commons steward failed
to hit on the device expressed in the later skit, and
purvey water for breakfast, dried apples for dinner and
let them swell for supper. It is true that, as a quali-
fying fact, certain of the tutors were forced to eat at
the old Commons and were charged with keeping order
in an institution not promotive of Chesterfieldian eti-
quette. But the records of the rebellion of 1819 prove
that the tutorial table was showered with some special
titbits from the kitchen which exempted it from the
general famine.

A font of tribulation annexed to the old Commons

62 YALE YESTERDAYS

was the buttery — gushing such entries in the Stiles
diary as this:

"March 26, 1782 — this evening about 20 or 25
scholars went into a great tumult and riot in contempt
of a public judgment and punishment inflicted in the
chapel for damages done to the Hall and Buttery.
Upon which they collected in a body for the demolition
of Old College."

The buttery was a kind of eighteenth century ana-
logue of the sutler's store or army canteen, where food
and drink could be bought to fill the aching voids of the
Commons — obviously thus an arch foe of old Yale
democracy and strongly savoring of "graft." It seems
to have been for a time the source of a Faculty order
allowing students to dodge the phantom suppers of
the Commons and buy food and drink for supper in
their rooms — hence new saturnalia in the dormitories
and more entries in the Stiles diary.

The vexations of the Commons reached two cli-
maxes— or rather a sub-climax and a climax later.
The sub-climax was the first Bread and Butter Rebel-
lion of 1819. For several days the students stayed
away from the Commons hall, meanwhile sending in
to the Faculty a long rehearsal of their woes. Their
specifications included drunkenness of the steward,
insolence of cooks and waiters, ham of mighty but
malodorous strength, ill-washed dishes, infirm coffee,
a "graft" in which the steward sold the Commons pie
to outsiders, entertainment of loose and mixed com-
pany in the kitchen and undue kitchen perquisites for
the tutors' table. It was a rigid and searching investi-
gation by the Faculty that followed, filling three days of
session and two old manuscript volumes, with every
waiter and the steward under cross-examination for

OLD TROUBLES IX COMMONS

and what with the degrading of the steward and the

as in onr day of

quaked the Uniwqsitf to its
On the fdknr maHnmpts that, with the

older of the records of a tdjutt-inj 1 f iial,, set uutth. the

reference to Upper and .Lower
after deeper reses

- — fl, mtm o*.£ • !•••••!• M^*mMkA«l »• >1 l^^fftfMnm fj^«" •• >-J—

. r . c . >. .. .'. _ . ?-r . r . _ . . r'_ ~ _.r ^ •- — r

the

.50

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me meaa ana
War,1" was four

64 YALE YESTERDAYS

The rebels, numbering "133 out of 261 in the three
lower classes of whom 29 do not board in the hall and
58 are out of town," took legal as well as moral
grounds, asserting violation of a statute under which
the Commons steward was ordered to provide board
such as prevailed in private families. But the Faculty
brushed the law roughly aside, refused to negotiate
until the return of the rebels to the Commons and
expelled four who were summoned before the Faculty,
and refused to yield. This joined heart with stomach
in the revolt. There was an aggressive mass meeting
in Hillhouse Woods, a later and "hands all around"
parting on the Green and the seceders scattered to
their homes. Later in cooler blood and under parental
stress, most of them signed a set formula of apology
and submission and returned — repeating in a major
key the experience of the schoolboy who gets a thrash-
ing at school and a second thrashing at home. The
old Yale graduate may be permitted to smile freely as
he reads in the list of signers thus forced to eat more
humble pie than that in Commons, the name of Elias
Loomis.

The output of literature while the "Bread and But-
ter Rebellion" lasted was prodigious. Petitions, pro-
tests, circulars from the Faculty to parents and the
public, "letters to the editor" and like screeds fill many
broadsides and not a few columns of the newspapers
in and out of New Haven. The New Haven Chron-
icle, a weekly newspaper of that time, tells us of an
offer of an unknown donor to pay the tuition ($33 a.
year) of 100 poor students who "design entering the
ministry"; and a letter of the elder Professor Silliman
penned to President Day — then at Andover, Mass. —
and giving a kind of diary of the rebellion, refers to

OLD TROUBLES IN COMMONS 65

the gift as one outcome of the trouble — perhaps the
tribute of an admirer to the stern and unyielding exer-
cise of academic authority. There is no actual record
of the gift, but one scents in it the germ of the later
and abundant scholarships of the Divinity School
which have had to be diluted by the new scheme of
service and self-help. As to the rebellion itself, it was
the last overt mutiny in the Commons. But disturb-
ances did not end and a theft of the Commons turkeys
was a culminating act that extinguished the institution
in 1841, to be revived twenty-five years later with a
representative of each table to make complaints, in
whom the "Grievance Committee" of 1903 again
repeats history.

Henry Ward Beecher, lecturing in the Lyman
Beecher Course of the Divinity School thirty years
ago, in the after-catechizing was asked by a theologue
a diffuse question as to the general policy of pastors.
Mr. Beecher looked quizzically at his questioner and
answered: "What sized coats do people in general
wear?" The reply covers the whole problem at the
Commons. It can be solved only when the Powers
That Be can equate human stomachs and suspend the
Latin proverb de gustibus non. To the young epicu-
rean from Fifth Avenue or even to some less gilded
devotee of "mother's cooking," the fare of the Com-
mons may be the target of scorn, while to the youth
from the starved New England farm, it smacks of the
ambrosia of the gods. To bracket the two types of
appetite is not within human ken, but meanwhile, out
of the old vexations of the institution, both parties to
its welfare may pluck some consoling philosophy.

IV
YALE'S FIERCEST STUDENT BATTLE

Recent graduates of Yale, as well as her undergrad-
uates, have scant conception of how physical Yale in
the days of the old Brick Row adapted herself to stu-
dent mischief and pranks, in contrast with the time of
her present stately quadrangle. Not to mention Cam-
pus policemen and electric glare o' nights, there is now
the open quadrangle with narrow entrances, save only
the open stretch between Dwight Hall and the old
Library. By contrast, the Campus of a third of a
century ago was, as to its internal and external layout,
a standing invitation to trouble. The whole College
Square was open to advance and flight; the huge elms,
sung by the Yale poets, covered behind their boles and
under their obscuring branches many a nocturnal fugi-
tive from the pursuing tutor; there were easy lines of
retreat around the corners and through the passages
of the old Brick Row; and, behind the Row, was the
jungle of buildings made up of the two coal yards, the
Cabinet building, the Laboratory and Trumbull Gal-
lery.

But there were two peculiar focal centers of mis-
chief and disorder, whose full powers as disturbers of
the peace are only fully realized now when a new struc-
tural order on the Campus has swept them away. They
were the Athenaeum, crowned by the circular observa-
tory much famed by the staccato jokes of Professor
Loomis, and the Lyceum, crested by the scabby pagoda

YALE'S FIERCEST STUDENT BATTLE 67

that sheltered the college bell. Freshmen going to and
from recitation crossed and recrossed the orbits of the
Sophomores also moving toward their dingy class-
rooms. The stone walk was narrow and, if no tutor
was in sight, Sophomores had acute ideas on the sub-
ject of its incapacity for serving both classes at once.
In days when Sophomore and Freshmen were at hot
feud for two-thirds of each college year, when hazing
was rife and the nightly rush was orthodox, the prox-
imity of the two old buildings as an incentive to aca-
demic strife may be inferred. They were, in truth, the
Corea and Manchuria of the wars of the two under
classes and their connecting flagstones were watched
sharply by the Faculty whenever Washington's Birth-
day or the Day of Prayer for Colleges let out the
Sophomore divisions from morning recitation in a
holiday temper of aggression. It was such a local
status of the rival structures that led, in general, to
many cases of marks, letters home and sterner Fac-
ulty discipline; and it was such a status, in particular,
that caused the great snowball fight in the winter term
of 1869.

There are four degrees of fitness of snow for con-
flict: One when the snow is crisp and dry underfoot
and when there can be no snowballing at all; a second,
when crust must be broken to reach moist snow; a
third, when the snow is moist but light and its missiles
innocuous ; and a fourth, when the new snow, saturated
by rain or fog, packs hard, tight and heavy under the
hand and becomes, relatively, deadly. It was under
the conditions last named that the great snowball fight
was joined. Its casus belli was simple and undiplo-
matic. One moist day in January, 1869, following a
heavy snow fall, half a dozen Sophomores of the Class

68 YALE YESTERDAYS

of Seventy-One came out from noon recitation at the
Lyceum in a playful mood of reaction after the throes
of Greek tragedy under Professor Packard. Into the
Sophomoric mind there entered then the pleasant
notion of a kind of ambuscade just around the south-
west angle of South Middle and "plugging" the Fresh-
men as they came out from the alley on their way to
High Street. For a few minutes from the Sophomoric
viewpoint, the plan worked cheerfully. Freshman
after Freshman, as he turned the angle, was duly
"plugged" by a volley of snowballs and expedited
toward his dinner; when suddenly a rosy cheeked
young Freshman, braver than his mates — he has since
become a famous doctor — in defiance of all the prece-
dents of Sophomore warfare, turned on his foes and
began to "plug" back.

"Rub him," shouted the Sophomores, and with the
words, a stalwart '71 man leaped for the youngster.
Both fell on the snow together. But the Freshman
was sinewy and agile and the "rubbing" was imperfect
and took time. The rough and tumble struggle at the
end of the alley blocked up the string of Freshmen
coming through. Numbers gave them courage. First
they began to volley the Sophomoric rubber, then
turned on the main body of ambuscaders and so the
great battle opened.

For the first quarter hour, the combat was little more
than an intensified skirmish, with single combats in the
foreground. Here and there a group of Sophomores
would charge a body of Freshmen, and now and then
a rough and tumble scrimmage would ensue with each
side encouraging its own man by shouts and discourag-
ing the other man with snowballs. But the combatants
would part and the general firing start anew. Then

YALE'S FIERCEST STUDENT BATTLE 69

each side began to be reinforced. Sophomore divisions
tumbled out from the Lyceum to join their mates and
more Freshmen came from the Athenaeum classrooms.
The thickening tide of battle began to drift to High
Street, the windows of the Cabinet building came into
the line of fire and the sharp crash of glass began to
punctuate the class shouts. This was the usual juncture
for the Faculty to appear, but for some reason unfath-
omed, no professor or tutor came. The conflict deep-
ened and by the time the drifting forces had reached
High Street, there were forty or fifty men on a side
and the set-to was fast waxing to the dimensions of a
pitched battle of the two classes.

Just as the moving fight reached High Street, oppo-
site the old Library, the Sophomores gathered their
forces and made a determined charge. Slowly, but
with increasing momentum, they pushed the Freshmen
down Library Street. It began to look like a rout for
'72, and an onward spurt by '71 just then would have
changed the whole fortune of the day. But suddenly
a stream of Freshmen, who had been practicing in the
Gymnasium poured out, and another Freshman rein-
forcement came from the eating clubs on York Street.
A new Freshman stand was made in front of the Gym-
nasium and the main battle of the day was on. The
Freshmen were massed between the Gymnasium and
the brick buildings opposite ; the attacking Sophomores
fronted them on Library Street with right wing de-
ployed on the Gymnasium lot and partly covered by
the angle of the building.

Not while memory lasts will the graduate of '71 or
'72 forget the snowball struggle that ensued for the
better part of an hour. The Yale catalog of the
time tells us that '71 had a registration of in men

70 YALE YESTERDAYS

and '72 of 176, and at least two-thirds of each class
were actively in the engagement. Seventy-One had
pluck and a Sophomoric zest for attack, and what '72
as Freshmen lacked in organization and confidence was
offset by numbers, and by a strong body of throwers,
indexed a little later by a triumphant class nine and
large representation on the University baseball team.
The battlefield itself was a thrilling scene. For ten
feet above it the air was literally vibrant with lines of
white. Fancy two opposed snowstorms driven by a
gale and every flake magnified into a small cannon shot,
and we get some crude idea of that atmospheric spec-
tacle. The big white bullets impinged on heads, bodies
and limbs, drew many a ruddy stream from contused
noses, "thudded" against fence, tree or brick wall, and
now and then shivered a Gymnasium window pane.
High Street was a veritable gallery of spectators.
Upperclassmen, townspeople, men and women, and
not a few of the Faculty were there, thronging the
sidewalk and roadway and reaching in a long line up
to the Yale carpenter shop. A humorous element in
the conflict were the contingents on each side of twenty
or more men of the feminine type of thrower, hardly
able to fling a ball in weak curve across Library Street.
But these technical weaklings showed pluck in the
front ranks, served to draw the fire of the enemy and,
later, were of service as a kind of ammunition train
for the men who could fire with force and precision.

The snow battle now entered its last stage. As
fighter after fighter on the Sophomore side grew
bloody, weakened and a bit discouraged, the Soph
leaders, seeing their class outnumbered and outclassed
in throwing, decided that something must be done. A
conference of two or three was held, the word went

YALE'S FIERCEST STUDENT BATTLE 71

around and presently some twenty of the stalwart Soph
warriors, carrying each some half dozen hard balls,
quietly gathered under the cover of the Gymnasium
corner. Then with a rush and a shout, they charged
straight for the center of the host of '72. For a
moment the Freshman center gave way. But a minute
or two more and the snowballs from fifty strong Fresh-
men arms began to converge at close quarters on the
little attacking column. Flesh and blood could not
resist that deadly hail in which a fighter had to take at
times half a dozen balls a minute on vulnerable cheek,
nose, ear or eye. The Sophomore column recoiled to
its protective Gymnasium angle. At Waterloo the Old
Guard made but one attack. At the Battle of the
Gymnasium Lot, the Old Guard of '71 made a second
advance, only to be driven back once more.

Then after the long battle had been fought for
nearly two hours came the climax. The leaders of
'72 saw in front only a weak body of scattered throwers
and on the right wing the repulsed and disheartened
Old Guard. With a shout, the '72 commander called
for a general advance, and with a whoop and a rush
it came. It swept away like straws the Sophomore
remnant of Library Street. On the Gymnasium lot
there was a moment's resistance, but there, too, what
was left of the Old Guard was rushed down to the
fence. "Throw them over," shouted the Freshman
captains, and one by one the last of the Sophs — very
last of them all, one who since has become a distin-
guished judge — were tumbled over on the sidewalk.
The great snowball fight was over and '72 had won.
The Freshmen gave nine cheers for themselves and
went off to dinner — or the doctors. Seventy-one went
off to both, without the cheers.

72 YALE YESTERDAYS

A cold snap stiffened the battlefield that night, and
for days it was a sight, with its trampled, blood-
streaked snow, and fences, walls and the tree trunks
dabbed thick with the "starfish" of the snowballs. At
Chapel next morning blackened eyes, bruised faces and
disfigured noses gave the Sophomore and Freshmen
benches the semblance of a hospital ward. Two or
three victims of the fight had a close call on permanent
injury to eyesight, but all pulled through in time ; and
the Battle of the Gymnasium Lot, fiercest and most
prolonged of the conflicts of Yale under classes, after
red lettering for a few undergraduate years the annals
of '71 and '72, passed into the limbo of unwritten his-
tory. The snowball skirmishes of Freshmen and
Sophomore on Washington's Birthday in these younger
days recall the great battle, but reflect it only in a pale
and ghostly light.

V
THE OLD "STATEMENT OF FACTS"

A recent photographic picture of old Linonia Hall
transmuted into a Yale recitation room will revive
graduate memories, varying in the scale from sub-
conscious pain to conscious pleasure. The really "old"
graduate — say antedating the sixties — will recall "Lin-
onia" and "Brothers in Unity" when they were "going"
concerns of the most vigorous type, genuine schools of
debate, foci of acute rivalry, reaching their "campaign"
tentacles far and wide to grasp the incoming Freshman
and a mighty component in both the social and mental
life of the College. There is a younger group of grad-
uates dating back from now for two or three decades,
who will see that Linonia classroom only as one prosaic
classroom of many, with not a trace of the old romance
and fancy or of association with Yale's once famous
"open" societies, now linked to the present time only
by the societies' library — a goodly and useful heritage.
But there is another intermediate group of graduates
to which the writer happens to belong.

His lot at Yale fell in a period when Linonia and
Brothers were in final transition downward. They still
had their names, their poster bulletins of debate, their
officers, their valuable and highly appraised honors in
the prize debates of each college class and their "State-
ments of Facts." But as weekly debating societies they
were the merest phantoms. Once a week the ornate and
richly furnished halls were duly lighted up. Once a

74 YALE YESTERDAYS

week a president took the chair. But he faced an
audience which, if it numbered a dozen undergraduates,
was reckoned phenomenal and with debating energy in
direct ratio to numbers. The two societies, as debat-
ing organisms, were, in fact, at their death-gasp and
only living on the breath of tradition.

But, as stated, the two halls themselves survived,
auditoriums of forensic luxury, a legacy from the times
when the rival societies were opulent as well as emu-
lative. They were of equal size, each seating com-
fortably some hundred and fifty undergraduates.
Their expired rivalry was revealed sharply in the varia-
tion of internal equipment. Linonia sported red as her
dominant color scheme; Brothers blue. Linonia shaped
her seats in a series of circular segments; Brothers
shaped hers in straight lines. Curtains, hangings, and
internal fixings generally, of the societies widely
diverged and, even, as now recalled, the order of
exercises. Each society had two forms of internal
ornamentation, or rather, of art, which was its special
and particular boast. Linonia's was a brace of statues
of classic orators, one at each end of her hall, high
pedestaled and arched by a red overhang, the statues
themselves some three or four feet high. They bore
no name or legend and hence their identity was lost,
though evidently of modern chiseling. Some said one
was Cicero, the other Demosthenes, though which was
which and which t'other no man could aver. Others
affixed to them titles of the Greek dramatists ^schy-
lus, Sophocles and the rest. All that could be said for
certain was that both were male in gender and were not
venerable enough for Socrates or Homer, or muscular
enough for Hercules, or of majesty sufficient for Jupi-
ter. Their anonymous quality served at once to fling

THE OLD STATEMENT OF FACTS 75

athwart them a veil of seductive mystery and make
them targets of humor.

The art treasure of Brothers in Unity was a large
painting in lurid tint hung high behind the president's
chair. As now recalled across the span of years, it
depicted General David Humphreys, a kind of tutelary
deity and reputed founder of the society. The General
in the painting had no isolated grandeur. He was por-
trayed as handing to Congress the surrendered colors
of Cornwallis — or something of the kind — with acces-
sories of tents, triumphant and flapping American flags,
prancing steeds and a background of embattled Conti-
nentals, the whole mellowed by time into a Turnerian
and yeasty atmosphere. It also remembered that the
General was superlatively pot-bellied — that physical
feature being a mark for Linonia orators in the "State-
ment of Facts," to be referred to a little later. The
painting would probably go down before the canons
of high art and has certainly found no place in the
up-to-date collection of the Art School. But for
"Brothers in Unity," it was an artistic gem of purest
ray serene.

As has been said heretofore, the annual "Statement
of Facts" lingered in the writer's Campus days as a
memento of the big old societies. Its exact origin is
lost in the mists of Yale tradition. But by impalpable
report, it dated back to some early time when Fresh-
men who had "held off" and were unpledged to either
society were hived in one of the society halls to listen
to the rival orators of each organization in serious
argument. Lending itself readily to burlesque and
fun, the "Statement" thus remained as a kind of resid-
ual garment of social bodies that had changed to
ghosts.

76 YALE YESTERDAYS

The "Statement" was programed for about the sec-
ond or third week after College came together in the
autumn — a time when the hostilities of Sophomore and
Freshman expressed in terms of street-rushing, hat-
stealing, and occasional hazing were at their apex —
and was big-bulletined on the elm trees of the Campus.

"Statement" night at the society hall found at half-
past seven or so the auditorium jammed with under-
graduates of the four classes. The frontal rows of
seats were by a kind of sardonic courtesy allotted to
the Freshmen, who, after running a perilous gauntlet
of Sophomore attack, had succeeded in reaching
Alumni Hall. The Freshmen — at least a good many
of them — wore overcoats and soft hats for defensive
reasons presently to be set forth. Sophomores and
Juniors donned the worst of their old clothes for rea-
sons identical with those of the up-to-date rush.

Three upperclassmen, chosen less for oratorical
power than for bombastic satire and the gift of rhetori-
cal "skit," spoke by turns for each society, usually in
prepared speeches, but with no restraints on extempore
rebuttal — the speeches thus taking on somewhat the
character of the "Fence" oration of these days, only
with far greater license and harsher personalities.
The keynotes were, of course, braggadocio for one's
own society, disparagement for the other, and along
these lines college wit had its full sweep. Did Lino-
nia's orator boast her great men, her prize lists, her
honors — Brothers' orator turned them to ridicule, tell-
ing how Linonia always had a jubilee if one of her men
won a second colloquy, got a mark above zero in Eng-
lish composition or won the place of water boy on a
class ball nine. Did the Brothers' speaker taunt
Linonia as a bantam rooster with crow bigger than its

THE OLD STATEMENT OF FACTS 77

bulk — Linonia's orator countered by likening his own
society rather to the great American eagle, which,
with one foot on the Alleghanies, the other on the
Rocky Mountains, rested its tail on the Gulf of Mexico
and majestically picked with its beak the icebergs of
the Arctic Ocean. Were a college tutor or upperclass-
man unpopular or eccentric, he was apt to be "loaded"
on the society to which he belonged. The art works
of each society were the open marks for infinite and
varied jest. Linonia's two statues and her own igno-
rance of their identity were perforated with forensic
javelins not a few; while poor old General David
Humphreys, perched in his Revolutionary war paint
above the two presiding officers — if the "Statement"
happened to be in Brothers Hall — and his massive
paunch passed through a worse ordeal than British
bullets — the next Brothers' orator very likely retorting
that in General Humphreys — Yale 1771 — aide de camp
to Washington and afterwards Minister to Portugal —
Brothers at least knew her own father and was not a
Linonia, dropped a foundling in a basket on Mother
Yale's doorstep. A favorite but rather trite opening
of the orators was, "Mr. President, Gentlemen, and
Sophomores," aimed at the noisy disturbers of the
eloquence.

Meanwhile, with intervals of comparative quietude
while the orators shot off their "stunts" and meta-
phors, the gathering revolved itself into Bedlam.
The Freshmen, hats drawn over ears and coat collars
raised high, listened to the "arguments" amid a fusil-
lade from Sophomoric pea-shooters and putty tubes.
That group of Freshmen, muffled against the bombard-
ment, was a ludicrous sight and one unfortunately be-
fore the days of snapshots. In the intervals between

78 YALE YESTERDAYS

the speeches half a dozen scraps at once would be in
progress between groups of Juniors and the class
below. When the proceedings neared their close
usually came the climax. With the concerted cry uPut
them out," the Juniors rushed on the Sophomores.
Seniors backed to the walls to see the fun, scared
Freshmen massed around the president's desk and the
body of the hall was filled with a medley of Juniors
and Sophomores, swirling and tumbling — an intensive
"rush" in narrow limits — but the mass gradually drift-
ing toward the outlet at the head of the narrow tower
stairway. Why in the descent, and with the many
tumbles where a steep flight of stairs converged at the
central shaft, no bones were broken may be accounted
for by the fact that when Junior or Sophomore fell, he
dropped upon a human cushion below. In this pro-
longed Junior-Sophomore rush in close quarters, the
rending of garments was, of course, immense. Many
a man went in with a sack coat and emerged with one
of the dress pattern, bifurcated at the top.

Sometimes the rush ended with formal forensic
"Statement of Facts." Sometimes the Juniors, after
some final hustling with the Sophomores on the Cam-
pus, went back to the hall and the font of ironic ora-
tory was tapped again, subject to Sophomore diversion
outside — such as an occasional missile through a win-
dow pane or as when, on one occasion, the Sophomores
turned off the gas at the meter in the cellar of Alumni
Hall and the Statement had to go on under the light
of kerosene lamps imported from the Junior dormitory
rooms.

But there have been enough of words to show the
character of the "Statement" in the later sixties and its
intensive "rush" features which at some early after-

THE OLD STATEMENT OF FACTS 79

date and, presumptively, by decree of the Faculty, gave
it its final quietus. With it died the last memorial of
the great open societies which for almost a century
were among the foremost coefficients of Yale under-
graduate life.

VI
TWO EXTINCT CLASS HONORS

The valedictory and salutatory orations, the highest
scholastic honors of Yale's Academic Department, first
appeared under those titles in the Yale Catalogue in
the appointment list for the Commencement of 1856,
and disappeared from the Commencement list of 1887.
The two orations were last delivered at the Commence-
ment exercises of 1894, where Frank Herbert Chase
was valedictorian and William Edward Thorns salu-
tatorian. For ten years the honors have been officially
recognized only by the first two names at the head of
the philosophical oration list. The academic Faculty
has now voted to abolish even that distinction, and to
print the names of the philosophical oration men
alphabetically. Before the two ancient honors quite
fade away on the horizon of a new Yale generation,
their history and their remarkable personal records
may be worth a brief review.

The records of the two portly volumes of Mr.
Kingsley's "Yale College" carry back the double honors
to the year and Class of 1798, when James Burnet was
valedictorian and Claudius Herrick was salutatorian.
But in those days and up to 1810, under the elder
President Dwight, the honors appear to have been
elective and similar to the class oration of today.
Down to about 1798, both the orations were delivered
in Latin, the salutatory by a new fledged Bachelor of
Arts, the valedictory by a Master of Arts. Then both

TWO EXTINCT CLASS HONORS 81

honors went to the Bachelors and the valedictory was
transmuted from bad Latin into better English. In
1810, as stated, the honors appear for the first time as
purely scholastic and were won respectively by Ethan
Allen Andrews, later Professor of Languages in the
University of North Carolina, and by Ebenezer Kel-
logg, afterwards Professor of Latin and Greek in
Williams College. The honors marking the "two best
scholars" in each class have thus existed officially for
at least ninety-five years, and are among the very oldest
in Yale history. They necessarily ranked extremely
high in the earlier and middle decades of the last cen-
tury, when scholarship counted for so much and be-
fore the rise of Yale literary honors, saying nothing
of the captaincy of the football team or the nine; and
through several decades the two honors were an all
but sure credential for a Senior society.

The double lists of winners of the honors absolutely
blot out the ancient Yale caricature of a one-lunged
and cadaverous valedictorian grinding out scholarship
at a hand organ. In the long roll of ninety-five vale-
dictorians by virtue of scholarship appear in the earlier
years such names as Prof. Ralph Emerson (1811)
of Andover; President Theodore Dwight Woolsey
(1820); Gov. Henry B. Harrison (1846); Prof.
Henry Hamilton Hadley (1847); Judge Dwight
Foster (1848) ; President Franklin W. Fisk (1849) ;
President Martin Kellogg (1850); Addison Van
Name (1858); and, in later decades, Prof. Tracy
Peck (1861) ; LeanderT. Chamberlain (1863) ; Dean
Henry P. Wright (1868) ; President Arthur T. Had-
ley (1876), and Professors Gruener (1884) and Irv-
ing Fisher (1888) of the College. In the list of salu-
tatorians are President F. A. P. Barnard (1828) ; the

82 YALE YESTERDAYS

Rev. Joseph P. Thompson (1838); Judge William
L. Learned (1841); Prof. James Hadley (1842);
President Timothy Dwight (1849) J Gov. Simeon E.
Baldwin (1861); Prof. C. H. Smith (1865); Prof.
G. F. Moore (1872), and Ex-President William H.
Taft (1878).

Many stars in the constellations of well-known
names in the two lists show how closely high Yale
scholarship has identified itself with after success in
teaching, in literature and in the learned professions.
The exalted niches won by five successive valedictorians
beginning with the Class of 1846 will be noted. But
the summary is positively amazing: From 1810 to
1904, inclusive, there were one hundred and ninety
valedictorians and salutatorians. Of the one hundred
and ninety there were seventeen who died ten years or
less after graduation, and to these should be added
twenty of the last ten years, who in so brief a time have
been unable to acquire fame.

More recent records show in the valedictory list,
twenty-four full professors in colleges or theological
seminaries, seven college presidents, two judges of
high courts and twelve who have won distinction in
other walks of life. In the list of salutatorians, seven-
teen have become full professors, six college presi-
dents, three judges of higher courts, one President of
the United States and fourteen have won other high
distinction. Of the Yale valedictorians, forty-five are
on what may be called the life honor list and of the
salutatorians, forty. The two lists together register
out of one hundred and fifty-three valedictorians and
salutatorians eighty-five, or about 56 per cent, who
have won success and distinction, the eighty-five includ-
ing forty-one full professors, thirteen college presi-

TWO EXTINCT CLASS HONORS 83

dents — two of them presidents of Yale, one of Colum-
bia and one of the University of California — five
judges of high courts and twenty-six in other branches
of life work; and if we add successful men of affairs
whose credentials do not appear in the Triennial Cata-
logue or in the limbo of honorary degrees, the remark-
able ratio would be still greater.

Hereditary scholarship comes out impressively in
the two lists. Prof. Henry Hamilton Hadley, vale-
dictorian of the Class of 1847, nad a father, James
Hadley, eminent in chemistry, who first urged Asa Grey
to botanical study; and a brother, Prof. James Hadley,
salutatorian of 1842 and father of President Arthur
T. Hadley, valedictorian of 1876. President Timothy
Dwight, salutatorian of 1849, sent to Yale his son,
Winthrop E. Dwight, who was the salutatorian of
1893. Dean Henry P. Wright, valedictorian of 1868,
is the father of H. B. Wright, salutatorian of 1898,
and another son, Alfred P. Wright, died just before
graduation after leading his Class of 1901 for four
years. Secretary of War William H. Taft, saluta-
torian of 1878, is a brother of Peter R. Taft, valedic-
torian of 1878, who died in 1889.

The highest stand won by a valedictorian during
Yale's period of non-elective studies was 3.71 (on the
scale of 4.00), attained by Dean Wright. The high-
est on record (3.73) was attained during the elective
period by William R. Begg of the Class of 1893. In
a recent class a graduate of another college who
entered Yale at the beginning of Senior year won a
stand of 3.75. He, with other "philosophical ora-
tion" men from other colleges, under a rule of which
few Yale men are aware, had to be put in that rank
below the "philosophical" men who had studied at Yale

84 YALE YESTERDAYS

two years or more and who by that fact were eligible
for the valedictory and salutatory.

The formal extinction of the two ancient Yale
honors undoubtedly has been compelled by the uncer-
tain tests of scholarship marks in the many studies and
groups of studies taught by different instructors under
the elective plan. But it breaks another of the con-
necting links between the required and elective system
and between the old Yale scholarship and the new.

VII
WOODEN SPOON MEMORIES

As seen and studied in that period of its fullness and
strength, the Spoon was a strange and fantastic insti-
tution in a Yale otherwise at least as democratic as the
Yale of today. It is not to be forgotten that the Spoon
Man was but one member of a committee of nine —
the "Spoon Committee" — and in the grade of popular
honors there were thus a big Spoon and eight little
Spoons, a tablespoon and eight teaspoons, so to speak.

There is an impression deepening in undergraduate
Yale and but lately strengthened by continuous lists of
old Wooden Spoon men and younger chairmen of
Prom committees, that the Prom chairman is the
hereditary successor of the men who, through many
years beginning more than half a century ago, won the
"spoon" as a token of first place in class popularity.
There is a dim likeness between the two honors, but
a likeness more of form than of fact. They differ in
such essentials as origin, in their rank tested by under-
graduate appraisal, in functions and, above all, in the
personal traits and methods by which the honors have
been won. But they are enough alike to serve as a kind
of text on which to hang some memories of the old
Wooden Spoon in its heyday, to depict some of its
characteristic features and to outline — possibly as a
warning — some of the infirmities which led to its
sudden death.

Like so many other college customs, the Wooden

86 YALE YESTERDAYS

Spoon struck its root in academic satire and prank. It
goes back by tradition to a wooden spoon bestowed as
a kind of "booby prize" on the English University
man who ranked lowest on the honor list. The tradi-
tion, evolving into actual history, first localizes the
spoon at Yale more than fifty-six years ago, as the
award to the biggest eater at the Commons — the bill
of fare shows that he must have had an intrepid
stomach — and the ceremony of presentation becomes
a burlesque of the ancient Junior exhibition. The bur-
lesque catches the college fancy and the prize next goes
for a number of years to the lowest man on the list
of Junior appointments. There is a kind of mock
committee, sometimes elected by the class, sometimes
self-perpetuating, dubbed Cochleaureati — after much
midnight oil dropped on the Latin dictionary. At first
the Spoon exhibition is under the Faculty ban. It is
held in secluded halls, collegians, and collegians only,
admitted after identification by doorkeepers disguised
as red men, and the inner program would hardly be
sanctioned by parental purists. But, grown institu-
tional at last, the "Spoon" takes on dignity. Its exhi-
bitions emerge from cover, are held in the biggest hall
in town, draw to themselves fashion and flounce and
leave the scholastic Junior exhibit far out of sight;
while the spoon itself, as a signet of the most popular
man in his class, becomes a prize more craved than the
Valedictory or DeForest Medal.

Such was the institutional Wooden Spoon as the
Freshman found it when he entered Yale in the middle
or later sixties, and, if he came from a big "prep"
school, he had already heard the honor named with
bated breath. Much as the late but not mourned
Sophomore societies reached back their conduits to the

WOODEN SPOON MEMORIES 87

schools, so the Senior Class at Andover and East
Hampton in the old days had, in youthful horoscope,
its own future Spoon man already forecast. Nor at
Yale did the fact that the Wooden Spoon committee
was a sure step to a Senior society election dull under-
graduate ambition to become "popular" and win a
place among the nine "Cochs." But on its public and
spectacular side, the spoon had also its lure for Yale
aspiration. The exhibition each June, preceded by the
ball on the night before, was the event of the college
year, the boat race with Harvard perhaps excepted.
Orchestral music of the first order, attractive decora-
tions, well-disguised mysteries as to "skits" on the
program, and the academic aroma over the whole, all
blended to make a seat in old Music Hall — now the
Grand Opera House in Crown Street — the object of
ardent endeavor and desire. The cry for seats was
loud and often unanswered. And even the modern
Prom, though on much ampler scale and with more
lavish effects in color and electric lights, does not
totally eclipse the scene in old Music Hall auditorium
with its "spoon girls" and escorts below and under-
graduate stags massed deep in the standing room
above. Student fancy had free play in the program
of the Wooden Spoon exhibition. There were bur-
lesque, farces, a presentation speech accented by the
big rosewood spoon, ornately carved and silver
labelled, a reception speech by the Spoon man —
usually penned by some better lettered classmate —
singing and always some hit at the Faculty. There
was ever, too, the so-called "opening load," as when
at the first rising of the curtain two of the Spoon men
step forward, open with their spoons a stack of straw,
and Mr. Berry, the Spoon man, steps out as the

88 YALE YESTERDAYS

"strawberry." The condensed program of the last
exhibition of all in 1870 may serve to sample many:

Opening Load.

Latin Salutatory.

Presentation of Spoon.

Reception.

Wooden Spoon Song.

College Comedy, "Who's Who?"

Younger members of the Faculty.

Tragedy, "Return of Ulysses.""

Songs on the Fence.

As now recalled, the features of this particular pro-
gram dropped pretty flat on the audience except the
tragedy burlesque, "Return of Ulysses," which, with
Penelope at her modern sewing machine, touched a
deeper nerve of fun. Nor did the average Spoon exhi-
bition of the sixties disclose very original Yale humor
which blossomed much more luxuriantly in the Thanks-
giving Jubilee. Even the annual "Spoon Song," which
was supposed to focus the spirit of the affair, seldom
rose higher than such ant-hills of Helicon as this :

Mem'ry shall ever,
With sweet perfume,
Twine in her garland
Thy name, Oh Spoon !

That the Wooden Spoon committee was chosen for
popularity rather than brains perhaps explains the
moderate intellectual plane of the exhibitions. But
the task of adapting breezy Yale fun to an outside
audience must have been a pretty hard one.

The Wooden Spoon, attractive once a year as a
public show, in the student life at Yale developed grave
evils. As a prize it erected a false standard of con-

WOODEN SPOON MEMORIES 89

duct and of purpose. Popularity became overmuch an
art rather than an element of character and grew into
a policy. In the quest for Wooden Spoon honors not
a few minds lost their scholastic and literary ideal, and
good fellowship budded into conviviality which some-
times ripened into vice. Before the Wooden Spoon
ceremonies and "spreads" ended, members of the
committee had to go deep into their own pockets and
thus "popularity" became in a large sense a perquisite
of wealth. But worst of all was the system which made
of the Spoon committee honors a sort of political
spoil to be distributed by a kind of two-headed caucus.
The caucus was the so-called "Coalition" of the two
leading Junior societies, which, with a bare majority
of the class in those days and voting together by hard
and fast rule, divided the committee between them,
alternating the Spoon man from year to year. Thus
a minimum vote of sixteen in a Junior society secured
a cochship and one Spoon man was actually chosen by
an original vote of seventeen. What impairment of
class — and society — unity, what personal tricks and
intrigues, what combinations and sub-combines, what
excesses of college politics and what personal heart-
burning and bitterness ensued from such a condition,
may be inferred. It reached a climax one year when,
in the hunt for a new credential of "popularity," the
ballot box was stuffed at an election of class deacons.
How such a standard of popularity, based on money,
intrigue and the fiat of a society caucus, was for years
accepted by many Yale Juniors of self-respect and
character was one of the many mysteries of student
ethics.

But affronted Yale democracy rose to the emer-
gency and killed the Wooden Spoon at what seemed

90 YALE YESTERDAYS

outwardly the period of its most vigorous life. The
Class of Seventy-One had suffered much from the self-
ish and tricky politics bequeathed by the system and
the example was not lost on Seventy-Two, some of
whose members began an active crusade against the
evil. One of their methods proved peculiarly effective
and really killed the Spoon. Two or three good
writers belonging to the first division of which Profes-
sor James Hadley was division officer, asked that he
give out as a composition subject in the subdivision the
question of the abolition of the Wooden Spoon. The
professor hesitated, expressed fear that the subject
would be either too controversial or too flippant, but
at last consented. He was doubtless amazed, as were
others, when on ''composition day" almost the whole
class poured into the room and overflowed into the
entry to hear half a dozen writers by agreement attack
the Spoon system without gloves. One or two other
divisions followed suit and class sentiment, sustained
by one or two timely editorials in the Yale Courant,
set in with deadly force against the anomalies of the
Spoon and a little later a mass meeting of the class
voted it down and out with practical unanimity.

So, after almost a quarter of a century of erratic
life, perished the Wooden Spoon, just as its pernicious
hold seemed strongest — useful, as a warning, if for
nothing else, against meretricious standards of Yale
popularity and useful, also, as an attest that Yale
democracy has only to rouse itself — as in the case of
the Sophomore societies — to make short work of mis-
chiefs of the kind should they recur.

Possibly a few old graduates of the writer's genera-
tion mourn its death. Most of them will say with the
statesman who, when asked whether he would attend

WOODEN SPOON MEMORIES 91

a bad man's funeral, replied: "No. But I approve of
it." To assail the ancient Spoon now may seem like
punishment after death, yet it is not amiss as a
reminder that in one feature, at least, the up-to-date
Yale is better than the Yale of the academic fathers.

VIII
FORERUNNERS OF TAP DAY

For obvious reasons not much has gone into print
of the old doings of the Yale Senior societies. So
what one seeks of their antique customs must be taken
not from the published word but from the lips and
memories of old graduates who, some of them, recall
the Yale happenings of a half-century or more ago.
They tell us how the Senior societies, like the others
at Yale, dead or alive, had to have small beginnings;
how they were the original conception of two or three
men who formed the nucleus around which the society's
group had to be built up ; and how necessarily for some
years elections were informal and desirable men had
to be seen and persuaded days in advance. One old
custom of the very earliest days of the Senior societies
appears to be a matter of clear record. After the
society lists had been made, a whole night was spent
in the election. And next morning the societies
marched from their halls in a body to Chapel, partly
as a bit of impressionism, partly as a kind of theoreti-
cal covering of their work by a quasi-religious function.

There was a later time when the election appears to
have been a midnight ceremony. Then the whole
membership of a society at the witching hour marched
to the room of the elected one with a frontal bull's-
eye lantern, routing him, if necessary, out of bed, to
proffer the election and congratulations — a ceremony
in a milder way and a later hour antedating the elec-

FORERUNNERS OF TAP DAY 93

tions of the old Sophomore societies of the sixties and
Calcium Night. Followed next an earlier hour and a
subdivision of the elective function. Instead of mid-
night was a period of from eight to ten o'clock on a
Thursday night of mid-May; and instead of the whole
society was either a single representative or a group
of two or three bearing a big society symbol. These
sought the elected Junior at his room — where he was
pretty sure to be found and to respond affirmatively to
the solemn "Do you accept?" formula. If he hap-
pened to be away, the offer was quietly made next day
and the list filled up.

In those days, the old Campus, with the thick elms
hiding the starlight was o' nights, save in lunar full-
ness, a region of Cimmerian gloom. There was no
Donnelly, of rotundity and gift of persuasive rhetoric,
to conservate order; no electric or other lights to fling
their detective rays on the individual disturber of the
peace; and the whole scenario of the Campus after
eight o'clock at night was of a nature to stimulate
mischief, prankery and, betimes, violence. The mys-
ticism of the elections was, in itself, a temptation to the
mischievous undergraduate, especially to those mem-
bers of the Senior Class who were non-society men.
Hence what may be called by backward reversion
"Tap Night" grew progressively to a climax unduly
boisterous. Entries of the Old Brick Row were
obstructed in various ways to prevent the access or
egress of the elective messengers; traps were set for
them in the form of tripping ropes; a prospective and
"sure" candidate for the honor might be tied or locked
in his room; and outside on the Campus the messen-
gers were hustled, rushed, sometimes their society
insignia stolen and, under most favored conditions,

94 YALE YESTERDAYS

they must run a gauntlet of verbal fire ranging from
joke down to individual shafts not always compli-
mentary.

Out of this waxing nocturnal riotousness, incurring
at the last Faculty disapproval, came sometime in the
later seventies the "Tap Day" of up-to-date, fixed by
society agreement, substantially unchanged since it
began and which more than three decades have now
made institutional.1

Senior Society elections in May, 1914, were for the first
time conducted away from the Old Campus, and in Berkeley Oval,
where the majority of the Juniors resided.

IX

GEORGE JOSEPH HANNIBAL,
L. W. SILLIMAN

"Not wishing, even under the most superlative temp-
tation, to interrupt the gentlemen in their studies, I beg
to ask whether they are not moved to purchase a
package of my old-fashioned, home-made molasses
candy." This rigmarole, familiar to every graduate
of Yale since the later sixties, will serve, without his
portraiture, to recall "George Joseph Hannibal, L. W.
Silliman, Esquire" (with a comma after the Hannibal) .
He was, in astronomical lore, the Alpha in a galaxy of
Yale's original Campus characters, in which Candy
Sam, Daniel Pratt, Jackson and Fineday have twinkled
as minor stars; and, if only to do proper respect to the
memory of Hannibal, he was also the "Omega," as
none is left now to take the place of the venerable,
garrulous and innocent-faced rascal whose wares, while
they pulled on the heart and purse strings of genera-
tions of Yale men, at the same time loosened their
teeth fillings.

Moreover, sad to add, in these days of Campus
exclusion these old characters have left behind not only
no successors but no Campus soil or environment in
which to breed them.

Hannibal's life beyond the Campus contains deep
gaps of mystery, which he was always primed to fill
at the expense of his reputation for truthfulness. His
birthplace and even his age are apocryphal — this

96 YALE YESTERDAYS

partly because of that imaginative vein in which, as
part of his stock in trade, he veiled his antecedents.
His birthplace he would fix now in darkest Africa,
now on Hillhouse Avenue; and his age — roughly
guessed by sober biographers at somewhere between
70 and 80 — he himself would carry back betimes to
ancient Carthage and the Alpine transit of his great
namesake, or, even more ambiguously, to the date of
the first thunderstorm in Connecticut. "Sah," said
Hannibal once in this connection to an inquiring stu-
dent, "I am getting so old that I can remember when
East Rock, sah, was a mere pebble."

What is known of him with fair biographic certi-
tude is that he was born in New Haven; that he served
various people in the Civil War, but not with brilliant
distinction; and that, after work in a local candy fac-
tory, he graduated from it into that cognate field of
saccharine culture at Yale in which, though dark him-
self, he was destined to shine. It is also well certified
that he was a married man, that his wife left him
twenty years ago and nothing else and that two
daughters survived him.

The step from the prose to the poetry of Hannibal's
personality leads to a more subtle analysis of character.
Freshmen sized him up as a freak and now and then
there was an older undergraduate who took the Han-
nibal epidermis for deeper tissue. Those who knew
him longer and better saw the actor; and with these the
satiric smile, which now and then broke his crust of
gravity, betrayed the underlying man of trade and of
profit to be coined by eccentricity. But his candy was
the genuine goods; his humor usually inexpensive and
harmless; he gave a certain unique zest to the life of
the Campus and of the old Fence; and, as one who

iv. ••••••

GEORGE JOSEPH HANNIBAL, L. W. SILLIMAN

G. J. HANNIBAL, L. W. SILLIMAN 97

knew the value of Attic salt in candy, he reached the
dignity of inventor if not of political economist. Han-
nibal had a graceful, somewhat spare, but well-knit
figure of about the middle size; features which, save
for color, gave small hint of the African race type ; and
a grave, not to say saturnine, expression that, by con-
trast, accented his polysyllabic humor and seemed like
a kind of grotesque mask hiding the features of a
smiling face. As a trick of his trade his rotund phras-
ing was as much in manner as in matter.

Hannibal's skits and jokes, not practiced much in
later life when old age had chilled his powers, were
no small factor in the intense dormitory life of the
later Brick Row period, more lately transferred almost
exclusively to the days of the big baseball and football
games at the Field. His magnum opus, used discreetly
for fear of the Faculty ban, was "throwing a fit," a
trick in whose rigors and convulsions, in perfect imi-
tation of a genuine seizure, he was past master. His
fits had their fixed tariff schedule. For a fit common-
place and ordinary the rate was twenty-five cents. For
an epileptic seizure "with foam at the mouth" as a
special frill, the schedule price rose to half a dollar.
Now and then Hannibal sold a higher class of goods
from his "fit" counter. If conditions were safe the
Sophomores, or eke upperclassmen, would for seventy-
five cents during the first college term hire him to fling
his fit while selling candy in the room of a couple of
green Freshmen whose quick emergence and dash for
the nearest doctor — and later payment of the medical
fee — gave tang to the successful deceit.

"My dear little son Nicodemus, brother of Ananias,"
was a fancy-child of Hannibal in whom centered not a
few of his lurid fictions. In one of the best of them

98 YALE YESTERDAYS

he used to tell how Mrs. Hannibal had accidentally
shut little Nicodemus in the kitchen oven; how the odor
of the baking Nicodemus disclosed the calamity; how
Mrs. Hannibal rescued the child "nicely browned and
looking more like his father than ever" ; and how the
anguished sire rushed down to Savin Rock to commit
suicide in the sad waves only to find that he had failed
to consult the almanac, that the Savin Rock tides were
out and that the journey over the sands toward Long
Island was sure to exhaust him before he reached the
water's edge. Those who have tried bathing at Savin
Rock at low tide will relish the metaphor. It was
after a similar escapade of the fictitious Nicodemus
that Hannibal dashed to the Tin Bridge over Mill
River with suicidal aim but refused to jump when he
saw that stream's dirty waters.

Here is one of his sample monologues of trade anent
the fabled Nicodemus:

"Gentlemen, not wishing in any degree to invade the
privacy of your studious seclusion, may I beseech you
to purchase a package of my old-fashioned, oriental
saccharine lemon drops, and relieve a starving house-
hold in which my son Nicodemus is eating the putty
from the window panes."

By a series of tricky bets, for small sums with the
Freshmen as chief victims, Hannibal eked out his
income from the candy trade. In the later sixties and
early seventies, the old-time sulphur matches were still
in vogue. "Gentlemen, you will observe this match,"
Hannibal would say. "Will, you collectively hazard a
quarter against my individual twenty-five cents that I
cannot extinguish and light it four successive times?"
On the formula of temptation the bet was accepted,
and Hannibal by a quick motion of the forefinger did

G. J. HANNIBAL, L. W. SILLIMAN 99

the extinguishing act, leaving enough sulphur for a
series of relights. Another bet based on his power of
returning a fifty-cent piece for a quarter with the
quarter never out of sight until the fifty-cent piece
passed was but a clever bit of palming a coin. More
original was Hannibal's trick of asking a guess of the
middle letter of the alphabet, drawing the laugh when
he followed the guesses with the remark, uln my igno-
rance, there being twenty-six letters in the alphabet,
may I seek knowledge and ask where is located the
middle letter of twenty-six?"

Hannibal was ambidextrous and, with limitations,
could write and draw rough portraits with each hand
simultaneously. But, as a boxer, he had overmuch
academic renown in an exercise tested — in fact — only
on novices. He was agile, quick and catlike in fisticuffs;
but it is pretty well certified that efforts were vain to
induce him to meet even amateur boxers of skill. As a
picturesque and familiar figure of the Campus he was
in demand on such occasions as old Thanksgiving Jubi-
lees and when Yale men, graduate or undergraduate,
foregathered for fun — on one occasion even figuring in
a Yale burlesque drama in New York. A brief Latin
oration which he had memorized for such jollities
followed by cries of "translate," "translate" from his
audience would bring forth some such addendum as
this: "Not wishing to reflect on the erudition of the
gentlemen, I have contributed a dime to supply each of
you with a pony." A host of old graduates knew
Hannibal and Hannibal knew them; and not without
crafty hope of a sevenfold return would he now and
then present an alumnus with a free candy package
"in kindly and sympathetic remembrance of the days
when we were brothers at old Yale." In the final

ioo YALE YESTERDAYS

summary of character, Hannibal, with his craft and
motive of trade veining his artificial eccentricity, was
not a candidate for sainthood. But his skits, his
jokes, his polysyllabic gifts and all-round versatility of
action and utterance give him an enduring place in the
memories of Campus, dormitory and the Fence.

"Candy Sam," whose real name was Theodore Fer-
ris and whose secondary title was, doubtless, of student
extraction, partly antedated Hannibal in time and went
him one better in color. He was absolutely blind, but
the infirmity with its "pull" on undergraduate sym-
pathy had its trademark value. Sometimes, led by
Mrs. Candy Sam, he would make a tour of the Brick
Row; but, in general, as the undergraduate phrased it,
he was "holding up" the Lyceum and Athenaeum, at the
twin entrances of which he became an institutional and
statuesque figure. His special gift was making change
in days before specie payments had superseded frac-
tional paper currency. Fifty-cent, twenty-five-cent, ten-
cent and five-cent notes he detected unerringly by the
"feel"; and there was a tradition that he could even
feel out the occasional counterfeit note. Sam was a
bit choleric and with defective sense of humor; and he
never forgave the Yale Courant of the time for ad-
mitting to its columns a playful skit alleging his arrest
for peeping into dormitory windows o' nights. He was
a faithful churchman of the orthodox creed while his
rival, Hannibal, was a proclaimed scoffer; and one of
the undergraduate diversions of the period was to bring
the two together in theological polemics not of the
Divinity School standard. It was at the end of one of
these discussions on Jonah and the whale that Sam got
in one of his few home thrusts. "Hannibal," quoth he,
"you wouldn't 'a' suited dat whale at all like Jonah.

•> > 1 >

I , • • • • '

CANDY SAM AND WIFE

G. J. HANNIBAL, J. W. SILLlMAN 101

Soon as de fish felt you goin' down he'd 'a' coughed
you up." Sam passed away in obscurity and, so far
as can be discovered, has not been embalmed in college
literature.

A contemporary of Sam was General Daniel Pratt,
G. A. T., the capitals annexed standing for his self-
made honorary degree of Great American Traveler.
He was a kind of intellectual tramp, a harmless freak
who claimed perpetual candidacy for the presidency of
the United States and whose name supplied joke or
metaphor for many an American journalist of his time.
General Pratt visited Yale periodically twice a year for
a few days each in October and June, coming from
nobody knew where. "From depths he came and into
darkness passed"; but he was always the same un-
changed Daniel Pratt in old-fashioned, faded garb,
dingy stove-pipe hat, thin figure and aquiline face
and charged up to the full with original eloquence and
poetry — the latter on broadsides which he sold to the
undergraduates. By some he was sized up as a crafty
tramp who, like Hannibal, adopted personal oddity as
a profitable trademark; by others, and probably more
justly, he was classed as mildly non compos. In either
character he was a human curio, beguiling many a stu-
dent hour with his off-hand oratory and rhymed —
rather than poetical — recitative. The supreme flight
of Daniel's muse was in his so-called "chain-lightning"
poem ending with the lines :

When Daniel Pratt leaps high in air
And comes down fair and square
In the President's chair.

Of course, at the end of oration and poem, alike,
Daniel's seedy hat went round; and if it came back

102 YALE YESTERDAYS

barren or nearly so, it was one of the best parts of the
play which followed when the Perpetual Candidate in
anger — probably simulated — rebuked "the students of
a great college who could buy such jewels of speech
with four cents, a cigar stump and peanut shucks." It
is related that a dozen smokers of the Class of '71 once
induced Daniel to start his pet oration in a South Col-
lege room which presently filled with the rich gloom
of the weed. The orator stopped his speech midway.
"Gentlemen," said he, "your speaker isn't a ham."

In that consulship of Plancus were other singular
Campus figures. There was Fineday, the flashy old
clo'man, of obvious Jewish breed, whose set formula,
"Fine day, come and have a bottle of wine," expressed
a sham hospitality as high as his prices were low.
More attractive was Jackson, the chimney sweep,
superlatively African in type, whose vocation in the
early seventies was in its sunset stage. Jackson, after-
wards promoted to be Farnam Hall sweep, was a
jocund and happy specimen of his race, of mighty
frame and stature and at his best physical glow when,
in bearskin cap and whirling his baton, he headed as
drum major the local colored brass band. But his
clearest title to fame was his "chimney sweep" cry,
rendered as follows :

Oh, I'm here today, I'm gone tomorrow,
Chimbley Sweep O, Chimbley Sweep O,

Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!
Chimbley Sweep O, Chimbley Sweep O,

Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!

The whole sung in a grand falsetto voice, of vast
carrying power, rising and falling in crescendo and
diminuendo, and reverberating from East to West

G. J. HANNIBAL, J. W. SILLIMAN 103

Rocks. Jackson's song, as now recalled, was in de-
mand for some years at class day exercises on the
Campus and sometimes at class reunions. But he was
an old man when his voice first leaped into academic
vogue and he early passed to the shades, where Han-
nibal, premier of Yale's old whimsical Campus char-
acters, has now joined him, to swap memories of the
long ago.

FACULTY REMINISCENCES

I

THE OLD YALE CLASSROOM

That somber description of the Yale classroom in
the late thirties which Donald G. Mitchell gives in
his "Dream Life" — the classroom of murkiness, smells
and stuffy atmosphere — had not, seemingly, much
changed in the writer's undergraduate day of the six-
ties. The recitation rooms in fact, at least many of
them, were identical with those of a quarter-century
before. Imitating the old Latin motto, they had
changed minds, not their skyline. There were the
same hard seats; the same stiff backs, infused with
vertebral pains; a dim, dank atmosphere — especially
o' winters — save when now and then the heater some-
where below got on a Saharic spree and broke the fog.
Of the decorative and aesthetic quality there was not
a chemical trace, and the mournful tint of the long
blackboards did but accent the encircling gloom of the
man who didn't know his lesson and was taking his
chance of not being called up. In the way of scholastic
facilities even the wooden side-pad was a later innova-
tion which, by common repute, the austere Faculty of
the time deemed too radical to be allowed without
serious discussion. Except two "overflow" class-
rooms in the ancient Cabinet building — standing just
north of the present Vanderbilt Hall — all the recita-
tion rooms were in the Athenaeum and Lyceum. The
Freshmen recited in the Athenaeum, the Sophomores
in the Lyceum and only South Middle stood between.

YALE YESTERDAYS

Each room accommodated about thirty students, the
normal "division" of the time — only the so-called
"President's lecture room" in the rear of the Lyceum
could hold half a class easily and a whole class as a
crowd.

Recitations were, of course, the standing order of
the first two years. Later came a few lectures in his-
tory and in philosophy and scattered lectures in physics,
in anatomy — at the medical school — in botany, chem-
istry and geology. The lectures in history and philoso-
phy called for examinations; the others did not, this
being almost the sole concession to leniency of the
Spartan Faculty of the period.

It was an academic epoch when the highly individ-
ualized professor of the old school had not been filed
down by modern forces and when oddities of habit or
character were common — indeed, the strongest of the
Yale teachers were also the most picturesque. There
was Professor H. A. Newton, slender, poetic in face,
mathematical devotee, who, when once started on a
demonstration of his own, would cover the whole
blackboard with his transcendental curves. Starting
with a curve beginning this side of infinity, he would
unconsciously occupy the whole recitation hour, at last
announcing triumphantly to the division, "and so you
see the curve returns from the other side of infinity."
It was Newton who adopted once a plan of marking
bad recitations in negative qualities. "What is my
stand?" asked of him R., a low scholar of a class
of the later sixties. "Minus fifty-seven hundredths,"
answered the professor. "Well, Professor Newton,"
said R., "I'm going to study mighty hard the rest of
this term and try to raise my stand to zero."

The title "heavenly twins," given by a witty under-

THE OLD YALE CLASSROOM jog

graduate of the early seventies to Professors Hubert
A. Newton and Elias Loomis, had in it the elements of
a misnomer. For "Newt," so called for short, lov-
ingly, was professor of mathematics, not of astronomy,
and "Loom" was graduated twenty years before his
colleague, who had taken up astronomy as a kind of
side study and mathematical diversion. Yet both by
congruity of astronomical taste and individual pecu-
liarities were bracketed naturally together in the under-
graduate mind and nomenclature. To Newton belongs
perhaps the most striking astronomical discovery of
his time- — that the comet of 1866 and the November
meteors have nearly coincident orbits and are inti-
mately related. Not so well known, indeed, almost
obscured by time, is the fact that Professor Newton,
not long before his death, using naked eye observations
entirely, fixed with definiteness the fall of a large
meteor to a very small area in western Connecticut.
To him and to Loomis have hung a long roll of col-
lege jokes which unto this day the grey-haired alumnus
repeats with zest. Both were professors of the old
school in times when astronomy filled a large arc in
the college curriculum. The study may sink below the
horizon of the elective system now, but in the pleasant
memories of the old grad "Newt" and "Loom" re-
main still vividly above it.

The old classroom was naturally the scene of under-
graduate prankeries. Woe to the young tutor who
had not the art or presence to maintain discipline, who
had not sized up the powers of his marking book or
whose near-sightedness gave scope for fun or dis-
order on the back benches. But the mischief was apt
to be commonplace and lacking the artistic quality to
be found outdoors and on the Campus. One of the

no YALE YESTERDAYS

exceptions to the rule of mediocrity was when an under-
graduate of the sixties secured a turtle, pasted a news-
paper on the creature's back and turned the combina-
tion loose during recitation in the Sophomore Latin
room with telling results. Classroom trouble usually
came from outside and was at its worst during the
Sophomore-Freshman hostilities of late autumn and
early winter, when the older and bolder class played
their pranks through the Freshman classroom windows
of the Athenaeum. An incident of attested record is
the trick of a Sophomore, leader in Freshman persecu-
tion, who thought his class was "letting up" on the
Freshmen too early or too much. He watched his
chance and in the winter gloaming drove three snow-
balls in succession through the window panes of a
reciting division of his own classmates. The "insult"
was, of course, laid to the Freshmen and the Sopho-
more lukewarmness for a season dispelled.

But those days of the old classroom asperities are
now, relatively speaking, tales of the past. The
Faculty are not ranked as arch-foemen of the under-
graduate. Comparatively the mischiefs of classroom
and Campus are extinct. Gentler manners have come
in and the old academic roughness has gone out. The
Brick Row period had certain virtues of its own. But
it also had its sins whose loss is Yale's gain.

There were other professors of wit and wisdom as
well as of peculiarities — Northrop, now head of Min-
nesota University,1 whose crisp comments like "if so
why not" at the end of a stumbling recitation stirred
the division to glee; and Packard, fine instructor but

1 Dr. Northrop was succeeded as president of the University of
Minnesota by Dr. George E. Vincent, '85, who was inaugurated
October 17, 1911.

THE OLD YALE CLASSROOM in

conscientiously severe, whose attitude was shown when
a student arrested for snowballing in Chapel Street
reported to him, after three absences at the City Court,
his acquittal. "Ah," said the professor, "then they
did not succeed in fixing it upon you." The incident
suggests what was the general fact, that, far more than
now, the relation of student to Faculty was one of
armed neutrality, if not positive hostility. The Fac-
ulty was the foe in authority, the student the target of
suspicion with the presumption always against him.
And of course, any classroom or text-book hit at the
powers — as when, for an example, Quintilian in his
elements of oratory says in his Latin, "This faculty
is composed of the simplest material" — brought out its
burst of applause with punitive sequels in "marks."

In those days, forty years ago, we had in the College
such men of striking personality as Hadley, Porter,
Newton, Thacher, Northrop and Loomis, each sui
generis. Now of all the instructors whom the writer
met then on Campus and in classroom not one remains.
Some few are on the emeritus list; most of them on that
longer list starred in the Triennial Catalogue.

Of them all perhaps the figure which rises most
prominently in mind is Professor James Hadley, the
senior professor in Greek, with his classic and refined
face, his measured and soft intonation, his perfect
phrasing of words and sentences. Hadley was a master
scholar in other branches than Greek. It used to
be told of him that when he took the Yale Greek
professorship the best mathematician in the country
was lost. His written English was of wondrous purity.
Of a small volume of essays published in later life it
was said that the Harpers — or it might have been
some other publishing house — held for a long time the

ii2 YALE YESTERDAYS

manuscript as a perfect example of copy — so clear and
beautiful was it in its penmanship, so exact in punctua-
tion and without an erasure or interline from beginning
to end.

Of Hadley there come, in lighter mood, three remi-
niscences. One was when he rebuked effectively spitting
in the classroom by the remark, "Gentlemen, those of
you who expectorate in this room need not expect
to rate high in the class." Another was the couplet,
which a poor scholar whom Hadley had let through
penned on a leaflet and passed round the division room :

Oh, had Had. had a heart of stone
How illy-had I fared.

And another episode when the place of the easy-going
President Porter for a single recitation in metaphysics
was taken by Professor Hadley. How systematically
did he "flunk" us — or, rather, did we flunk ourselves!
Then Professor Hadley took up the lesson paragraph
by paragraph, analyzed it clearly — here and there
dissenting from the views of President Porter, author
of the book — and gave us a new and really informative
metaphysical perspective.

Speaking of President Porter, this incident is re-
called of an alumni meting. He had introduced as
speaker the famous William M. Evarts, who had been
in a President's cabinet and a United States Senator
from New York State. As a "gag" on Porter, Evarts
told this story:

"I was going down the Mississippi with a friend on a
steamboat. Near Natchez we came abreast of a thin
mud bank where swallows had made their nesting
holes. On the sharp upper edge of the bank appeared
sections of the old holes worn away in varying degrees

THE OLD 'YALE CLASSROOM 113

of arc. Said my friend, 'Evarts, do you see the mud
of that hole all but worn away? Take it all away and
leave the hole.' That's metaphysics."

President Porter's gentle laxity in recitation will be
remembered by many a graduate "who now parts his
hair with a towel." It was perhaps mere tradition that
the president never read his examination papers and
took the term stand for his final marks. To a student
who went to him with eighty disciplinary marks where
usually forty-eight spelled suspension, Porter said:
"I'll take off thirty if you'll account for the other
three." The inauguration of President-elect Porter
was a gala day — and night — in the autumn of 1871
when the Senior Class in torchlight procession visited
him at his Hillhouse Avenue home headed by the vale-
dictorian with a beer barrel on a pole and labelled
"Porter," the president in his speech expressing the
hope that the cask was filled only with metaphysical
beer.

It was at the close of his Junior year that a member
of the Class of '72 crossed Chapel Street one day to
market his disused text-books with George Hoadley,
who blended sale of second-hand college literature
with phantom lunches. The budding Senior having
sold his wares at prices as spectral as the lunches,
happened by merest accident to lay hand on a volume
on the counter which proved to be a text-book of Senior
year edited by Professor uTommy" Thacher and used
by him in first term. Its text was a long and legal
oration by some old Roman — may be Cicero, but not
now recalled. But, opened, its pages were a wonder.
Its former owner with a pen sharp as a needle and
with penwork fine and clear as agate type had inter-
lined the whole translation from "Tommy's" own

ii4 YALE YESTERDAYS

lips, and on the margin the answer to every one of his
classroom questions was written out. So fine and deli-
cate was the editing that three feet away the page
became a mere foggy blur, but merging into absolute
distinctness at normal reading distance. It was an
"Oration" stand at its lowest certified without study.
That the unique work was bought in a twinkling — price
thirty-five cents — and that it served its buyer — a mod-
erate scholar — well next term follows logically. Then
came the sequel. He sold it for five dollars to a Junior,
a dripping from the class above and still in acute class-
room perils. At the end of the next Senior first term
"Tommy" addressed his division half frantically thus:
"Gentlemen, this is the poorest fourth division that I
have ever taught in Yale College. But among you, I'm
glad to say, is one very poor scholar in general but
who with me has kept a First Division stand." It
was the man who owned the text-book aforesaid, which
afterward, by repute, went down at a mighty price
through several successive college generations.

On a crowd of Sophomores waiting at the old Fence
to waylay Freshmen, "Tommy" charged down with the
words, "You're a disorderly gathering! Go asunder! !
Go asunder!!!" afterwards paraphrased into "Go to
thunder!" He was not much of a classroom humorist
but had to laugh with the rest of us one day when one
of the dunces of the class in Latin Comp., after guess-
ing several times at the needed form of the verb
ignoro) hit on the right one, ignora mus. Professor
Thacher was a pretty strict disciplinarian, but guide
and friend to many a student in unmerited trouble.

The Grand Old Man of the old Faculty, his sun rose
and set in his Yale loyalties. In the President's lecture
room one of the long seats creaked resonantly at one

THE OLD YALE CLASSROOM 115

end when a Senior student's foot pressed it at the
other, thus hiding the mischief-maker. "Stop that!"
thundered uTommy" one day when the noise had per-
sisted for two or three minutes. The creaking stopped
but presently began again. "I said 'stop' and that
noise stopped," thundered Tommy again. "It proves
deliberation and not accident. The man who is doing
that is unworthy to be a Senior in Yale College" —
illustrating how unworthiness for Yale was Tommy's
supreme anathema. The Faculty once appointed
Professor Thacher, who was senior professor in Latin,
to teach political economy for one term. His exordium
to his division ran thus: "Young gentlemen, I am a
professor of Latin. The Faculty in an emergency
has asked me to teach political economy. I ask your
charity."

II

AN OLD SCHOOL PROFESSOR

The name of Professor Elias Loomis is one to be
honored by Yale men not merely for his record of
personal service in the classroom through more than
a third of a century but for his great benefactions
directly and indirectly to the University. His memory
is now to be perpetuated urban-wise through all time
by the title, "Loomis Place" given by the Corporation
to the new street which is to be cut through the
University grounds. The new memorial is a fit text
upon which to hang some personal recollections of a
Yale teacher distinctively of the "old school" type but
whose unique traits made him almost a type by himself
among a group of colleagues in the Faculty not lacking
in old-fashioned picturesqueness.

Turning briefly to the biography of "Loom," as he
was affectionately desyllabilized by the undergraduates
of his time, one finds that he was the son of a clergy-
man and born at Wellington, Conn., in 1811. He had
a brilliant scholastic boyhood, was reading Greek as
a youngster and passed the examinations for Yale at
fourteen years of age, though not entering until a year
older, and graduating in the Class of 1830. The
Commencement program of the Class of 1830 shows
that Loomis had an oration on "The Influence of
Emulation on the Progress of Mental Improvement" —
a prolix theme that satirizes his laconic habit of speech.
Followed next a year of teaching in Baltimore, then

PROFESSOR ELIAS LOOMIS

THE OLD SCHOOL PROFESSOR 117

a year in Andover Theological Seminary — and thus
those who remember "Loom" have a humorous vision
of what he might have been as a preacher — perhaps
a foreign missionary. But he gave up the clerical
intent and in 1832 came to Yale as tutor. The custom
of the Yale Faculty in those days, as later, was to "plug
in" a tutorial novice into any vacant classroom chair —
indeed, the dictum seemed to prevail that the stronger
a young teacher had been in mathematics, the wiser
for him and his pupils it would be that he should teach
Latin or Greek. At any rate, Loomis for a time was
"plugged" tutorially into the classics. And again, we
have a somewhat comic thought of the future great
mathematician dipping out to callow collegians the
waters of the Pierian spring. But we have a test of
his success as tutor in the words of Chief Justice Waite,
of the United States Supreme Court, "If I have been
successful in life, I owe that success to the influence of
Tutor Loomis more than to any other cause whatever."
Appointed professor of Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy at Western Reserve College in 1836 he
took the chair after a year of study in Paris. But the
same year, 1837, with its financial stress, left the col-
lege in hardship, unable to pay its instructors and, in
Loomis' written words, "without enough money in the
treasury to take me out of the state." Salaries had
for a time to be paid in farm produce. Yet during his
seven years at Western Reserve one obtains glimpses
of the unique "Loom" of after years at Yale. He
built a campus fence a third of a mile long on which
he spent many hours to establish an exact north and
south line. More apocryphal is a tale how a mighty
cyclone passed over the college and drove a dead hen
into a sandbank an indefinite number of feet; and how

u8 YALE YESTERDAYS

Loomis, with a dead chicken fired from a field-piece,
repeated nature's experiment to determine accurately
the velocity of the cyclonic blast.

Professor Loomis next (1844) began a service of
sixteen years in the chair of Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy in the University of New York — a service
marked by the beginnings of the series of text-books
on mathematics and astronomy. First and last, it is
said, six hundred thousand of them were sold. They
were the major sources of the estate which finally came
to Yale. In 1860 Yale called him to succeed Professor
Olmsted and with the opening of his Yale professor-
ship memory flies back to the personal Loomis whom
the mediaeval Yale undergraduate knew. It was a
singular figure even viewed visually and objectively,
marked by those same mathematical exactitudes that
ran through his text-books. His frame was slight and
moved along the New Haven streets and Campus walks
with an invariable slow gait. The college boys used to
contend that if the lengths of his stride from morn to
nightfall could be measured they would not be found to
deviate by the infinitesimal fraction of a millimeter.
His garb hardly varied more. There was the inevi-
table high hat, the close-fitting black coat — half between
frock and cutaway — the familiar old-fashioned linen
stock — all flawlessly neat, yet a garb which, by its chal-
lenge to modern change of fashion, conveyed an idea
and general impression of seediness. But the outer
man of cloth was secondary to facial contours, not
much modified by the spectacled semi-ellipses — one for
long, one for short sight. It was the face that spoke
the man — rigid, unemotional, set in straight lines,
always looking right ahead. Sometimes he smiled, but
it was a closing and mathematical extension of lips

THE OLD SCHOOL PROFESSOR 119

rather than parting of them. When at vast intervals
and under the strain of some uncommon press of humor
the lips of Professor Loomis actually parted, it was
reckoned the equivalent of another man's uproarious
laughter. It is doubtful whether living man, at least
in Yale days, heard Professor Loomis laugh. As
was his face so were his general habitudes. He was
an embodiment of the precisions as inflexible and even
as a mathematical scale, his crisp, brief speech tallying
with his other temperamental exactitudes. And there
was a quality of the Loomis voice, high pitched and
staccato, that makes it quite impossible by the written
word to express the man — especially to a younger col-
lege generation that knew him not. But his grey-haired
pupils of the Senior and Junior classes who sat before
him on the adamantine college benches will remember.
There are thronging memories of funny incident
and episode of the "Loom" classroom. It was a class-
mate, whom we will call Jim Sullivan, who had made
cribbing a fine art. He seemed to have a kind of tele-
scopic eye and when on his feet in recitation with only
the slightest divergence of glance downward he could
read an astronomical text-book on the floor — espe-
cially as that particular text-book, Loomis' own, was
printed in large and clear type. But this Napoleonic
figure in cribbing met his Waterloo at his first recita-
tion in the Loomis classroom. "Sullivan!" called
Loomis, and Sullivan rose confident of a cribbed
"rush." "Book shows, that will do," said the Pro-
fessor, and Sullivan sank down into a "flunk." Then
there was that other classmate, Sweeney, a good nat-
ural scholar but infirm and reckless in preparing his
task. The main subject of the morning's lesson was
the use of the big celestial and terrestrial globes and

120 YALE YESTERDAYS

Sweeney was called up to manipulate the spheres and
find in Canton, China, the time corresponding to that
on his watch in New Haven. Sweeney was working on
the subject and watching his time while Loomis' back
was turned made through the door what, in the official
college vernacular of the day, was termed an "egress,"
thinking the professor would forget. Loomis said
nothing but lay low and at the opening of the next
recitation sent Sweeney to the globes with the same —
or similar — question. Sweeney, deeming it but a coin-
cidence, essayed the same trick again. But just as he
was silently slipping through the door the professor
called, "Sweeney, you'll be called on the same subject
tomorrow." Sweeney crammed the subject and on the
morrow got there; and "Loom" never reported the
matter to the Faculty.

In the lecture room his talks on physics were incisive
and condensed and his experiments worked out in ad-
vance with a care which rarely left room for imperfec-
tion, much less for failure, but usually prefaced with
the saving remark: "The nature of the phenomenon
I conceive to be this." To him — and to another pro-
fessor— of chemistry — is attributed the comment after
the failure of an experiment: "Experiment fails, prin-
ciple remains." It was in a lecture before a division
of the writer's class in the old building that stood just
to the west of the present Connecticut Hall that the
professor scored one of his biggest experimental tri-
umphs. He was secretly proud of his accurate aim with
the air gun and had hit the little target thirty feet
away several times and once at the center. Presently
came a shot which seemed to miss the target altogether.
The division laughed. Loomis peered at the target a
moment, walked up to it, squinted sideways at it again,

THE OLD SCHOOL PROFESSOR 121

drew out his pocket knife and dug out a bullet from
the central hole. "Last bullet in the exact center over
the first," said "Loom," and amid the thunders of
applause from the benches one saw his lips part in his
rare equation of a real laugh.

In those days the most prominent firm of New
Haven stationers was Skinner & Sperry. A student
had sent in to the Faculty meeting a letter purporting
to be from his father — living in a distant city — as an
excuse for some academic default. Loomis took the
letter, held it up to the light and exclaimed, "Water
mark, Skinner and Sperry. I move that B." — naming
the student — "be suspended."

One would infer from his temperament that Loomis
was a severe disciplinarian. Yet, as a division officer,
he was never unpopular or deemed overstrict. He
enforced the Faculty rules but with an even and exact
scale of justice that carried with it a sense of fairness
which commended him to the undergraduate. And
now and then he quite relaxed. They tell a story of
him in Faculty meeting where the case of a Sophomore
and a Freshman, who had been in a Campus fracas —
who, in fact, had been in a genuine fight — was on trial.
The Sophomore was a notorious bully and breeder of
trouble who had repeatedly incurred Faculty discipline.
"Did the Freshman hit him?" queried Loomis. "Yes,"
was the reply. "Did he hit him hard?" "Yes, hard."
"Very hard?" "Yes, very hard." "Then," said
Loomis, "I move that the case be dismissed."

Of positive slips in his scientific work only two are
on record. In his astronomy in the section on "tides"
appears the statement that at the head of the Bay of
Fundy the tides sometimes rise seventy feet. A former
pupil of the professor went to Nova Scotia and made

122 YALE YESTERDAYS

not merely careful measurements of the great tides
but of their past records, finding that the highest known
in the half-century had been about forty-three feet.
Meeting Loomis on the Campus a few months later,
his old pupil informed him of the "book" error. After
a moment of depression, the professor replied: "Took
it from other books. Should have gone and measured
the tides myself." The other slip was in connection
with a question raised by a leading newspaper of New
York City "Whether an ice boat could under any con-
ditions sail faster than the velocity of the propelling
wind," which was left in the form for a reply by Pro-
fessor Loomis and two other eminent physicists, one
of Columbia, the other of Princeton. All three,
strangely enough, answered the question in the nega-
tive and had to retract after a storm of protests had
come from the ice-boat men with their testimony to
the superior speed of the craft sailing across the wind.
But on the side of his precisions may be noted the fact
that in the year 1835 when a tutor at Yale he fixed
with the crudest instruments the latitude and longitude
of the old Athenaeum tower within two seconds of the
best computations today.

In his last days and almost in his last hours he was
moved from his boarding house to the New Haven
Hospital where he passed away; and it is told that in
the final moments of delusion old classroom words
passed his lips, such as "That'll do, you may go,"
addressed to his nurse, while his last words of all were
"What's the weather?" The probate of his will dis-
closed an unlooked-for estate of more than $300,000,
practically all, after an annuity of about two-thirds
the income for two sons, going to Yale for astronomi-
cal uses — and those sons have since further commemo-

THE OLD SCHOOL PROFESSOR 123

rated their sire by fellowships in science of $10,000
each. Thus both on the mental and material side, in
terms of high personal service and concrete heritage,
will the name of one of her most remarkably individ-
ualized sons go down into the future annals of Yale.
In the Memorial Hall of the University on the tablet
placed by his old pupils is his fit tribute: "An exact
scholar, an astronomer of wide repute, in meteorology
a pioneer and a large benefactor of this University."

Ill

ANNALS OF OLD-TIME EXAMINATIONS

One of the last indirect contributions to the Alumni
Weekly of the late Frederick J. Kingsbury, '46, was
his brief tale of how he found one day a classmate
whittling with his jackknife an enlargement of a knot-
hole in the sash of a window of one of the college
classrooms just before a term examination — this for
the easier passage of a "skinning" paper, so-called. To
Mr. Kingsbury's query, "What are you doing there,
Jim?" came the reply, "Preparing for examination."
The pun attests the fact that even in those far-away
days of the last century, cheating the Faculty at exami-
nations was in vogue. Probably, too, its moral status
in its relations to the Faculty — as measured by the
undergraduate standard — was much the same as twenty
or thirty years later whereof these memories are
penned. That is to say, a college man of good
scholarship who "cheated for stand" was rated dis-
honorable. Not so the man of perilously low scholar-
ship who hung by the eyebrows on the brink. In the
eyes of his classmates his successful "skin" through a
hard examination was invested with a quality half
heroic, half jocose. He had "done" the Faculty, who
had been trying to "do" him, and had won a personal
triumph over his official foes. The sentiment was
morbid, no doubt, but it was there and held its own
from class to class.

ANNALS OF OLD-TIME EXAMINATIONS 125

There is a better undergraduate sentiment now, by
common and trustworthy report. The old practice of
"skinning" under its modernized term of "cribbing" —
a vernacular change like the shift of the old "rush"
into the verb "to kill" — has dropped to minor degrees.
Certainly one hears nowadays relatively scant Yale talk
of pains and penalties inflicted by authority for cheat-
ing. Old graduates will note this improved academic
era from various points of view. Some will lay it to
the general betterment of college morals with its talk,
and sometimes actuality of an "honor" system at
examinations; others will refer it to elective studies
and the potential choice of subjects, easier because, as
a rule, more congenial, and yet others, with plausibility,
will accent the fact that in those days the examinations
were harder and, in the case of a larger proportion of
undergraduates, more fateful. Harder and more fate-
ful they surely were. In these years the examination
year splits into two parts and the exam ends the ordeal
for each section. In those days there were two stiff
term exams, one in late December, the other in late
March or early April, and not less searching because
they were vocal; and in June came the dismal and
dreaded "Annual" in Alumni Hall, spanning all the
studies of the year. Each subject was usually three
hours long, a whole class being individualized in
Alumni Hall around the hexagonal tables that remain
to this day. How many a frail scholastic bark went to
pieces on the rocks of the "Annual" only the records of
Woodbridge Hall and the leaves of the non-graduate
catalog — properly sifted — can tell. But frequent as
were its wrecks and portentous its ordeals, they were
pitched in a minor key as compared with the funeral
march of the "Biennial" exam, covering the classroom

126 YALE YESTERDAYS

work of two full years and which held on from 1850
to 1865. Moreover, those were times when each man
must toe the dead line of required study with mathe-
matics writ big and electives yet unspelled. No escape
then for the man who was a shark in algebra and
geometry but a minnow in Greek and Latin or vice
versa.

Far more than now was the temperamental trend of
the instructor in the classroom studied as a clue to the
exam. Was he exacting in subjunctives? — subjunctive
passages in the text were best crammed. Had he
emphasized in recitation a particular group of formulas
or problems? — those were the ones to "line up" on.

The death in ripe old age of Cornelius S. More-
house, the "grand old man" and dean of New Haven's
printing industry, a founder of the house of Tuttle,
Morehouse & Taylor, for years the Yale printers and
at once factors and watchdogs of the examination
papers, recalls those days of the biennials and annuals,
the tricks of "skinning" which they generated and the
irrepressible conflict in which the precarious scholar
set his wits and, sometimes, his desperation against the
keen vision — and prevision — of the Faculty.

Many of the tales are apocryphal or imported to the
Yale Campus from other and indefinite college lati-
tudes. Such, for example, is the legend of the printer's
devil at T., M. & T.'s, hired by the Sophomores to don
white duck trousers, sit down accidentally on the
printer's form and bring out the Euclid figure on the
seat of his pantaloons. Equally nebulous, the tale of
the venturesome Sophomore who "shinnied" up the
water-pipe and, with strong opera glasses, peered
through the skylight of the printing house and "got"
the paper. More credible is the story of the heavily

ANNALS OF OLD-TIME EXAMINATIONS 127

bribed printer who rested his shirt sleeve on the form
and sold his undergarment to a Yale class for $300
as a private speculation. What is certain is that des-
perate attempts used to be made to get the paper —
usually in mathematics — but very rarely with success.
"A Graduate of '69" (L. H. Bagg) in his "Four Years
at Yale" tells of one such bold venture that failed:
how two professional burglars were brought up from
New York, dogged the mathematical professor and
got a glimpse of the paper — in conic sections — but
could not identify the figure, so many in the book being
alike; how, with two Sophomores, they broke o' night
into the printing office, when their dark lantern went out
and one of the Sophs had to hie him back to the Cam-
pus for a new light; but how the keenest search amid
forms and cases and presses failed to reveal the longed-
for sheet. That story of his class by UA Graduate of
'69" is genuine and a measure of the exam despera-
tions. Mr. Bagg also tells us, forsooth, that one of
the despairing Sophs of the burglar venture got
through that dreaded exam by the bold trick of "double
papers," with imitated handwriting — passed in — for
a price — by a high stand classmate.

Of the impressionist type is also the story of the
bribed printer who brought out the mathematical figure
by the device of dropping his handkerchief on the form,
sitting down upon it and thus securing the impression.
It is a pat comrade to the pantaloons legend but rests
on more direct evidence.

The pocket game, with the skinning paper held
through the slit trouser leg and the long double scroll,
winding and unwinding twixt thumb and forefinger
figured too often in the annual exams. It was named
the "roly-boly" ; and, in truth, there was here and there

128 YALE YESTERDAYS

a crippled scholar who began his uroly-boly" at the
beginning of the term, condensing its figures and formu-
las until it covered the whole book and the product a
marvel of cribbing ingenuity — to be sold to some infirm
scholar of the next class should the text-book be con-
tinued. Among what the college boys of our time
termed the "easy meats" of the classroom, Professor
Noah Porter, afterwards president, undoubtedly took
the first undergraduate prize with his persistent blind-
ness to the most palpable crib — a trait familiar and
celebrated with thunderous applause by his college audi-
ence in Center Church when, in his inaugural address,
he announced that "the relation of teacher and taught
should be kindly, sympathetic and unsuspecting"

Out of clear memory of those old days comes one
veritable incident. One goes back to Frederick N.
Judson, '66, now a great lawyer of the West and late
chairman of the Yale Alumni Advisory Board. At
the time of the episode he was teacher in the Hopkins
Grammar School and was carrying home in his hand
the papers of the Virgil exam when he stopped to pass
a word with a Freshman of the Class of '70 Yale.
Just then a gust of wind turned up one of the edges of
the package. It showed just two initial words of the
passage of the Georgics, but 'twas enough. The sharp
eye of the Freshman caught them, the sub-Freshman
class of the Grammar School was duly notified and the
passage — with prudential limitations — "killed" at the
exam the second and unseen passage, carrying off a
fraud which otherwise might have been scented.
^Eolus, god of the winds, became for the nonce a
Grammar School deity.

The ancient and honored house of Tuttle, More-
house & Taylor has almost no records of an exam

ANNALS OF OLD-TIME EXAMINATIONS 129

paper lost, strayed or stolen, but, per contra, a long
narrative of successful precautions. For some years
its foreman used to cart press and type to a sequestered
room of the old library, where, under surveillance of a
member of the Faculty, the paper was "set up" by the
foreman, whether in English or Greek text — not an
irrational precaution in days when $1,000 or even
$1,500 might be obtained for a "hard" paper, espe-
cially in mathematics. Later, the preparation of the
papers has been transferred to a select corps of printers
in a locked room, also under Faculty watch and ward.
Yet once or twice the papers have gone astray. Once
the package was taken from an errand boy by a city
detective, hired for a big sum by the students ; but the
rasped sealing betrayed the fraud to the professor
when the package was delivered and a new paper was
printed. So careful was the late Professor Seymour
that when a package of the Greek paper was left acci-
dentally in his vestibule, he went to the pains of printing
a new one. In the contractural relation of the parties
the firm furnishes plant and printers of high character;
the Faculty assumes the rest of the responsibility.

IV
YALE ASTRONOMY, OLD AND NEW

In the evolution of the elective system of study at
Yale it appears to have come to pass that astronomy,
outside of the Prospect Hill Observatory, is singing
its swan song. At any rate, as has heretofore been
noted, the new academic elective pamphlet offers no
course in the study for the college year 1910-11,
though there may be a single course in the year follow-
ing; and the same exclusion is found both in the courses
of the graduate branch and of the Sheffield Scientific
School. The change has come, too, strangely enough,
during a period of a decade or two when astronomy has
been popularized — when the daily papers give us their
monthly map of the constellations, when each new celes-
tial discovery is heralded in the press despatch, and
when the canals of Mars and the mutations of Halley's
comet reach out from the big observatories into the
illustrated magazine article. What has actually come
to pass at Yale has been the transit of astronomy from
a classroom to a research study.

That the ancient Yale scientists, in their crude way,
delved in astronomy is certified by some of the earliest
records of the College. In 1747, as a yellow and time-
worn page in the Treasury shows, the College owned
along with other scientific apparatus : UA telescope with
a tripod; two sets of posts and a glass to be screwed on
to look at the sun; a pair of globes celestial; and an
orrery," the latter technically explained as a contri-

YALE ASTRONOMY, OLD AND NEW 131

vance to illustrate by revolving balls the movements of
the bodies of the solar system. The revered President
Ezra Stiles in his famous diary under date of June 23,
1779, gives us some astronomical addenda to the Yale
collection. They include "President Clap's planeta-
rium about 7 feet diam. ditto exhibiting the astron.
movements by mechanism. Mr. Austin's ditto in wires
about 3^ Diam. Telescope, a reflector. Mr. Williams'
cometarium. Mr. Austin's lunarium. Mr. Clap's
comet of 1744. Brass quadrant, astronomical," the
latter given by Christopher Kilby of London in 1757.
The reference to "Mr. Clap's comet" hints, if it does
not prove, that President Stiles' predecessor, as Yale's
official head, was the object of celestial attraction.

How President Stiles dabbled in every branch of
science and had his theory for each, his vast diary in
many pages attests, and astronomy was one of his chief
objectives. He tells of stars, planets, solar phenomena.
But among his delicious and quite unconscious fakes
may be rescued verbatim this, which will be informative,
for the astronomer up to date :

Nov. 12, 1788.— Mr. Sam Mix at North Haven saw the
meteor of 17 Oct. and judged it to fall a little west of his
house. He has seen four or 3 others heretofore; one of which
he stopt and caught in a Net as he was fishing at Dragon on
the East River 2y2 m from Y. College; this was a Mucilage or
Gelly; another on the Rode from N. Haven to North Haven
near Balls about five miles out of Town, it fell down in the
path near him, he examined it and found it a gelatinous sub-
stance; another elsewhere which he kept till it froze and he
cut it with his Knife. These were little irregularly formed
bunches of Gelly. Col. Levi Hubbard tells me he was one
eveng. returning to Town and near the Neck Bridge he saw
a Light which he first took to belong to the houses in town a
mile off — but it came forwd in the Course of the Neck Lane
until it struck upon his breast and dissipated in luminous Gelly.

132 YALE YESTERDAYS

His cloaths were all besmeared with it till he arrived home to
his own house in Town. Hence the Meteors in the inferior
part of the Atmosphere called Jack O'Lanterns or gelatinous
Congelations (concretions) of the phosphorus kind, which being
subtile and very much attenuated float in Air and are carried
along by gentle streams of air till they strike objects or fall to
the ground. Mr. Chapman of Tolland once followed one that
fell and found near half a Bushel of Gelly on the ground. It
is luminous by the phosphoral attraction of fire out of air.

First in the Yale roll of genuine astronomers as
pioneer comes Professor Denison Olmsted, 1813, emi-
nent in all-round scholarship as well as in the lore of
the heavens, gifted as teacher and a teacher himself
of other great Yale teachers, promoter of public edu-
cation in Connecticut, as strong in good citizenship as
he was in the classroom. It was in Olmsted's time that
Yale, in 1830, got her first real telescope — ten feet
focal length and five inches aperture — reckoned in
those days the best in the country, and through which
Olmsted in 1835 caught Halley's comet on its return,
several weeks before the announcement came from the
star-gazers of Europe. It was Olmsted also who first
gave to the world the true theory of meteoric showers
after witnessing the great shower of 1833, and along
with it came his theories of the Aurora Zodiacal light.
That he worked up the whole College for years to a
high pitch of astronomical enthusiasm comes as a
strange commentary from the early nineteenth century
on the present stellar hiatus at Yale in the first decade
of the twentieth. What Professor Olmsted was as a
teacher is attested indirectly by one of his text-books
on natural philosophy which ran through no less than
a hundred editions; and directly by the group of
astronomers and mathematicians who drew from him
their classroom inspirations, including Elias Loomis,

YALE ASTRONOMY, OLD AND NEW 133

'30; F. A. P. Barnard of the same class, president of
Columbia College; William Chauvenet, '40, professor
of Astronomy at the Naval Academy; J. S. Hubbard,
'43, astronomer of the Naval Observatory; and
brilliant young E. P. Mason, '39, who, as an under-
graduate, made important original contributions to
astronomical science and was making more when
tuberculosis took him a year after graduation — the
dread disease which by sad and strange coincidence
swept away four promising sons of Professor Olmsted
in young manhood, all four graduates of the College.

YALE WORTHIES

I

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR

The life at Yale in classroom, in dormitory and on
the Campus of the Yale graduates whose lodgment in
Connecticut Hall, renamed from South Middle Col-
lege, has just been commemorated by tablets, make
one fact very prominent: all, or nearly all, of those
men, whatever their personal idiosyncrasies, ranked
high in scholarship, in literary work and in debate.
Their standing in College thus forecasts success in after
life and has repeated the tale told on a larger scale of
Yale's valedictorians and salutatorians — men as a rule
reputed far below the average in postgraduate deed,
but who, as the actual records show, have risen far
above the middle line.

Taking up in order of graduation the men of the
Connecticut Hall memorials, there comes first the name
of the famed jurist, James Kent, of the class of 1781.
In these words of his own in which he sums up the
intellectual elements of his undergraduate career, the
truth of his statement may dilute its flavor of conceit:

My four years' residence at New Haven were distinguished
by nothing material in the memoranda of my life. I had the
reputation of being quick to learn and of being industrious and
full of emulation. I surpassed most of my class in historical
and belles-lettres learning and was full of youthful vivacity and
ardor. I was amazingly regular, and decorous and industrious
and in my last year received a large share of the esteem and
approbation of the President and tutors. I left New Haven
September, 1871, clothed with college honors and a very promis-
ing reputation.

YALE YESTERDAYS

Simeon Baldwin, once Judge of the Supreme Court
of Connecticut and classmate of the Chancellor in
1781, describes Kent as systematic in his studies spite
of the many interruptions of the war; very retentive
in memory; among the best of the class in belles-lettres
and classics and at the head of the class in general
reading and literature. So absorptive was his mind
that from the style of his last composition could be
inferred the author just previously read. But Kent, in
his early college years, had one fault, symptomatic,
however, of mental activity. So fast did ideas rush to
his tongue that words came too rapidly and were apt to
"lead off" into incoherence. He broke himself of this
habit by rehearsing to Baldwin with orders to stop the
speaker when words began to flow too swiftly; and
Baldwin tells us how often Kent, when overchecked,
would sit down and weep copiously. Kent graduated
with the honor of the Cliosophic oration which, in those
far-away days ranked him second in a graduating class
of twenty-seven men. Yet Baldwin, himself, later a
member of Congress and a Judge of the Connecticut
Supreme Court, says of the great Chief Justice and
Chancellor of New York State that "although a dis-
tinguished scholar in his class he acquired nothing at
College and nothing in the circumstances of the time
which, without great personal effort, could make him
the most eminent jurist of his time."

Chief Justice Kent's room was on the fourth floor
of the north entry of Old South Middle on the front
corner, overlooking what was then the college yard
and the Fence.

Three years more bring us to another embryo jurist
on the Yale Campus, Jeremiah Mason, Class of 1788,
later United States senator from New Hampshire. In

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR 139

his case there is an autobiography but not one that
gives much space or emphasis to his College career.
His first day at Yale was a bit galling. Going up to
the Campus to view the college buildings, he encoun-
tered in the college yard a man booted and with whip
in hand who asked if he were a Freshman: uYes, sir,"
answered Mason. "Take off your hat then, when in
the presence of one of the government of the College ;
and go and ring the bell for prayers," said the per-
sonage. Young Mason obeyed orders, went to the
Chapel, sought the bell rope in vain and went back to
his lodgings — only to be summoned later for disobe-
dience to the room of uone of the government of the
College" (Tutor Channing) and get a vigorous haul-
ing over the academic coals for not knowing that the
rope had been drawn up to the belfry. At this point
the paternal Mason, then a member of the Connecticut
General Assembly, interfered to rescue his son from
the fagging system of the College and secured the son's
lodgment with a tutor in return for part payment of
tutorial room rent and other service duly rendered.

Mason's undergraduate autobiography is chiefly of
value for its sidelights on the scholastic Yale of the
time. He tells us how the learned President Stiles
"had excellent talents for government; was both loved
and respected and maintained a sound discipline; and a
boy that would not study had an uncomfortable time of
it." Those who have read the famous diary will recall
the President's intense love of Hebrew and his insist-
ence on its study by the whole Senior class; but will
hardly wonder at Mason's testimony that "we learned
the alphabet and worried through two or three Psalms,
after a fashion; with the most of us it was a mere pre-
tense. He (President Stiles) said that one of the

140 YALE YESTERDAYS

Psalms he tried to teach us would be the first we should
hear sung in Heaven and that he should be ashamed
that any of his pupils should be entirely ignorant of
that holy language."

There follows a bit of scholastic "graft." Mason
at Commencement in his forensic disputation on the
legality of capital punishment tells how he ustole the
most of my argument from the treatise of the Marquis
Beccaria, then little known in this country. It was new
and consequently well received by the audience ; indeed
its novelty excited considerable notice. I was flattered
and much gratified by being told that my performance
was the best of the day."

Jeremiah Mason's room was on the third story of
the same entry as Kent, the front corner room. Mason
was regular and diligent in studies; stood first in his
class in Latin and mathematics; was strong in disputa-
tion; and was one of the Chapel monitors. The early
bent of his mind is indexed by constant attendance as
an undergraduate at the New Haven law trials.

The academic record at Yale of Eli Whitney, Class
of 1792, whose invention of the cotton-gin swerved a
great nation's history, is all too scant. He roomed in
the north entry in the ground floor corner room, the
old-fashioned windows of which are today the same as
in his time. In Stiles' diary under date of April 30,
1789, the President's brief entry, "examined and
admitted a Freshman," is probably first official refer-
ence to the illustrious inventor. A second entry under
date of July 12, 1792, proves that Whitney owned
rhetorical as well as mechanical gifts :

12 — Whitney of the Sen. class delivered a Funeral Oration
upon his classmate Grant, who died in Georgia last spring. He

FIREPLACE IN ELI WHITNEY'S ROOM IN SOUTH MIDDLE

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR 141

was the fourth that has died out of that class. The oration
was well delivered and publickly in chapel.

The oration was afterwards published.

Professor Denison Olmsted's memoir of the inventor
informs us that Whitney did not enter College until
twenty-three years old; earned most of his way to and
through College, chiefly by teaching; in College gave
more attention to mathematics and mechanics than to
the classics but wrote many good compositions and
some verses — less famous now than his cotton-gin; and
that his written words, as an undergraduate, reveal
imagination, a political cast of thought and exultant
patriotism over the recent release of his land from the
British yoke. Here are two incidents that depict the
inventive bent of the young academic scion :

On a particular occasion one of the tutors, happening to
mention some interesting philosophical experiment, regretted
that he could not exhibit it to his pupils because the apparatus
was out of order and must be sent abroad to be repaired. Mr.
Whitney proposed to undertake the task and performed it
greatly to the satisfaction of the faculty of the College.

A carpenter being at work upon one of the buildings of the
gentleman with whom Mr. Whitney boarded, the latter begged
permission to use his tools during the intervals of study; but
the mechanic, being a man of careful habits, was unwilling to
trust them with a student and it was only after the gentleman
of the house had become responsible for all damages that he
would grant the permission. But Mr. Whitney had no sooner
commenced his operations than the carpenter was surprised at
his dexterity and exclaimed "there was one good mechanic
spoiled when you went to college."

Two entries of the Stiles diary, while not during
Whitney's undergraduate life, jostle it in time so closely
that they are here annexed:

Feb. 22 (1794). Mr. Whitney brot to my house & shewed

142 YALE YESTERDAYS

us his machine by him invented for cleaning cotton of its seeds.
He shewed us the model which he has finished to lodge in
Philadelphia in the Secretary of States office where he takes out
his Patent. This miniature model is pfect & will clean about
a dozen pounds a day or about 40 Ibs before cleaning. He has
completed six large ones, barrels . . . five feet long to carry
to Georgia. In one of them I saw about a dozen pounds of
cotton with seeds cleaned by one pson in about twenty minutes
from which were delivered above three pounds of cotton purely
cleansed from seed. It will clean 100 cwt a day. A curious
and very ingenious piece of mechanism.

March 12 (1795). — Yesterday morning Mr. Whitney's
workshop consumed by fire. Loss 3000 Doll, about 10 finished
machines for seeding cotton & 5 or 6 unfinished, & all the tools
which no man can make but Mr. Whitney, the inventor, &
which he has been 2 years in making.

The undergraduate personality of James Gates
Percival, Class of 1815, introduces us to a "remote,
unfriended melancholy" but not "slow" genius, a man
of moods but with spasms of amiability and cheerful-
ness. Many verses he penned during his college life.
The poetic outbursts used to follow the musings of
long and solitary walks after each breakfast and
supper. Then he would return to his room, in the
English phrase "sport the oak" and for an hour or
two, pen in hand, let genius burn. In his first college
year he offered the manuscript of his poems Seasons
of New England to General Howe, then local book-
seller and publisher, whose literary shop stood on the
present site of the New Haven House; and the muse
was crushed to earth for awhile when Howe refused
even to examine verses penned by a Freshman. Guys
and "skits" of his classmates levelled at his passion
for verse-making brought out at first tears and such
exclamations as "I will be a poet"; afterwards satirical
skits of his own aimed at his torturers. As a versifier

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR 143

he was bold and persistent; wrote a tragedy and took
part in it as an actor; read his poems intrepidly at the
meetings of Brothers in Unity; and used to paste them
on the college walls while he stood near and listened
to the comments of his readers. In person the colle-
giate Percival was of middle size, light complexion,
with an agreeable but somewhat stolid face; and very
sensitive to animal suffering, as witness his anguish at
the violent death of one of South Middle's host of rats.
He was antipodal to existing fashion. Did the College
cut its hair long, Percival cut his short; did fashion
dictate short coats, Percival wore his long; was black
dominant in color garb, Percival donned grey; and he
never blacked his boots. But in scholarship he was
stalwart, studied mathematics as a recreation, made
eighty-four abstracts of the lectures of the elder Silli-
man — said to be the best digest of them extant — and
would have won the Valedictory oration but for an
impediment of speech. Such is the strange hybrid of
recluse, crank, poet and scholar that summarizes under
Yale's elms Connecticut's foremost muse.

Percival's room when in South Middle was in the
north entry, which housed most of the men whom Yale
has now honored. The geologist-poet lived on the
fourth floor of the old dormitory, in the back room,
where later President Porter lived.

If Eli Whitney, Kent, Jeremiah Mason and Percival
lent early luster to the quaint gabled chambers of Old
South Middle, a later succession of famous names
added to the value of the old brick dormitory as a
priceless Yale heirloom. Woolsey, Porter — two Yale
Presidents — lived there, as did Horace Bushnell, the
spiritual New England theological leader, and Edward
Rowland Sill, Yale's best loved poet.

144 Y4LE YESTERDAYS

Strangely enough in the case of one who impressed
so recently and so deeply his character on Yale, the
records tell us little of the undergraduate life of
President Woolsey, Class of 1820, in which class he
graduated at the age of nineteen. In the main his life
as student was that of the scholar and writer, his
literary activity being reflected in a manuscript periodi-
cal, the Talebearer, edited jointly by himself, Leonard
Bacon and Alexander Twining, uncle of President
Hadley. In the Talebearer appears poetry of varied
merit and essays, most of them of a didactic and some-
what skilled undergraduate type. In its higher literary
flights, for example, are a poem by Bacon on "Vinegar"
dedicated to the "acetic" muse, and an essay by
Woolsey signed "Peter Ponderous" that traces out
satirically the changes in the fashion of dress. Wool-
sey was one of a "hexahedron" of six friends formed
to continue college intimacies after graduation by
exchange of letters. In 1820, Woolsey's year of
graduation, at the Phi Beta Kappa's Commencement
banquet the Faculty forbade the use of wines. The
society declared the Faculty ultra vires, and insisted on
the wines, which Woolsey and the next in classroom
rank as the two "best scholars" duly passed around.
The Faculty did not press the matter.

It was during Woolsey's stay in College that the
debating society, Linonia, fell into discord and schism.
Thirty-two members from southern states, objecting
to the election of a northern president of the society,
seceded to form the Calliopean Society — which con-
tinued a southern organization until its passing in 1853,
when it owned with minor assets a library of 6,000
volumes.

The Talebearer gives us side glimpses of this

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR 145

trouble and some offshoots of it in Brothers in Unity
where the paper, read at the meetings, furnished
criticisms that did not always assuage forensic bad
temper. The records of Woolsey are interesting in
connection with some comments of his on the good
showing of the college catalog of 1820 in which, pre-
casting the possible growth of Yale to 1,200 students,
he asks "how could the President instruct a class of
300 men?" giving thus a passing view of the functions
as instructor of the head of the College in the old
Yale. Woolsey, graduating as valedictorian, was
evidently a student whose high scholarship did not bar
him from a large group of strong personal friends.
There is no proof that he cared for sports or even for
exercise beyond long walks; but those who remember
his bent form in later years will marvel when told that
as a Senior his stature fell but a quarter inch below six
feet.

The great name of Horace Bushnell, Class of 1827,
in later years so large in theology and still growing
with the years, does not appear to have had big under-
graduate dimensions, actual or prophetic. Long an
invalid in maturer age, Bushnell, on the Campus, was
a well-grown young man, both wiry and sturdy in
frame, robust in general physique, ruddy in cheek,
carrying a head of unusual size marked by deep-set
eyes under a mass of raven hair. A trait of good-
fellowship is hinted in the familiar title, "Billy Bush,"
given him by his mates. He was versatile, loved
nature, exercise, sports — especially fishing — and music,
in which he was so versed as to be a member of the
Beethoven Society and the college choir; and he seems
to have been a good "mixer," albeit much of his
dormitory life was that of the scholar. In his

146 YALE YESTERDAYS

academic four years he had bitter soul wrestlings,
stirred by religious doubt, to which he once referred
in an eloquent passage of a sermon preached many
years after in the Old Chapel. Bushnell took part in
the first uconic sections rebellion" of 1825, which is
to be sharply demarcated from the much more serious
conic sections rebellion in 1830. In his Sophomore
year his class claimed that, by explicit contract with its
mathematical tutor, it was exempt from the corollaries
of the text-book, and, when the corollaries were
insisted on, thirty-eight — including Bushnell — out of
the class of eighty-seven men refused to recite and were
suspended by the Faculty. Parental authority sus-
tained that of the College and the great theologian
with the rest, signed this formula of repentance.

We, the undersigned, having been led into a course of oppo-
sition to the government of Yale College, do acknowledge our
fault in this resistance, and promise, on being restored to our
standing in the class, to yield a faithful obedience to the laws.

Bushnell had good comradeship in the mutiny which
included such classmates as Chief Justice Welch, of
Minnesota, Judge Henry Hogeboom, of the New York
supreme court, Professor Grosvenor, of Illinois Col-
lege, and President William Adams, of Union Theo-
logical Seminary; and the famous preacher is quoted
in later life as justifying on moral grounds the academic
sedition and, presumptive, repenting his own pro forma
repentance. He had a trace of impetuosity in his
nature. Once on the way to Chapel noting a classmate
"stropping his razor the wrong way," he dashed into
the room, took the instrument in hand, showed the
true art of making an edge, and all the way to the
Chapel doors dilated ardently on the theme. Horace

SOUTH MIDDLE'S ROLL OF HONOR 147

Bushnell lived in the south entry of Old South Middle,
in part of the room occupied by the Dean's office.

Concerning President Porter, Class of 1831, few
reminiscences are handed down. He entered College
in his sixteenth year, a round-shouldered lad and the
smallest member of his class — thus coming to be
familiarly known as ''Little Noah Porter" ; but in later
undergraduate years he shot up to the average stature
of his classmates and lost all awkwardness of figure.
In sub-Freshman days he had bursts of sudden anger,
but of these college life gave him almost complete
control and not a trace of them survived into later
life — a self-mastery that credits his Yale training.
While not athletic, he was a keen lover of outdoor
sports of the quieter type — though they tell of him
that, after shooting his first game bird and seeing its
dying struggles, he gave up shooting as a sport. He
was an ardent lover of nature also and self-trained
into a good botanist. Diffident and retiring in his early
academic years, as an upperclassman he became promi-
nent as scholar and debater, excelled in mathematics,
and was noted in the classroom for clearness and pre-
cision in thought and speech. Simple in habit and
manners, he disclosed on the Campus the same geniality
that marked him as the later professor and president;
and there an undergraduate personality destined for
the Yale headship seems to end. President Porter's
room was the same as that of James Gates Percival
sixteen years earlier.

Edward Rowland Sill, '61, the poet, whose name is
written large in Yale's literary roll (though possibly
his fame is on the wane just now with the critics of
American verse), roomed in the south entry of the old
building where he lived his mutinous and original life

148 YALE YESTERDAYS

at Yale. His room was on the back corner of the
third floor. Sill was a dreamer from the day he
entered the College. His memoirs show him to have
been an omnivorous reader, though very little in love
with the curriculum of the day. He was of an original
mould and was very likely one of the exceptions that
proved the rule that, considering the state of education
in this country at the time and the uses to which college-
bred men put their collegiate education, the old formal
prescribed course turned out the best men. For Sill
the curriculum of his day was a thorn in the flesh. He
disliked being forced into the groove his classmates
studied in, and he objected strenuously to having his
mental pabulum digested for him by his classroom
authorities. He made the old Library his friend, and
was more immersed in the odd volumes he was con-
stantly extracting from its shelves than he was in the
books his tutors laid before him. Sill was not widely
known at College, but some of his tenderest and most
delightful lines were penned here, perhaps in some
dusty, secluded corner of the Library, or in his Campus
room, with its open fire, its low ceiling, its paneled
doors, and its small-paned windows looking out on the
Campus and toward the towers and minarets of the
old Library across the lawns.

II

THE TIMES OF BAGG

Of the late Lyman H. Bagg, UA Graduate of '69,"
and author of "Four Years at Yale," a book which for
all time will be a historical index of the undergraduate
life of the College during the sixties and for some
years later, there comes back to the writer across the
gap of forty years a vivid picture. One sees again a
form that might have stepped out of one of Dickens'
novels — bent at the shoulders, boyish in stature, aqui-
line and wrinkled in face, and with a peculiar expres-
sion, half humorous, half cynical, which instantly
demarcated him from the common student type.
Bagg's face was not a fortune, nor did it necessarily
denote genius. But it had the contours of a decided
and strong individuality. Joined to the figure of the
man and a unique shuffling gait that never seemed to
vary in pace, it was the outward sign of a strange
personality and, in its way, of a gifted one.

It was not as a classmate that the writer knew Bagg,
but as a contemporary on the Campus, who met him
more frequently at New Haven and elsewhere during
a few years after his graduation than perhaps before.
But in the life of the Campus he is recalled as essen-
tially a man of what would be called now "outside
activities," chiefly of a mental sort. He was seen at
the ball game or the boat race, but not uplifted into
the athletic enthusiasms; apparently a good mixer with
his class and apt to be one of the familiar figures

ISO YALE YESTERDAYS

perched upon the ancient and honored Fence ; reputed,
and doubtless in fact, an inveterate collector of Yale
memorabilia, which habit may indeed have been the
germ of the volume that perpetuates his name.

Mr. Bagg was a clear writer but not imaginative
and with a proclivity for objective themes, including
statistics, in which he had the gift of precision. His
literary rank, measured by the standard of his College
time, is indicated by his editorship of the Yale Literary
Magazine; and, for some obscure reason, apparent
defects in imagination did not prevent his election as
class poet. His class poem, by the way, has internal
evidence that he struck rocks in the normal classroom
voyage. It comes out in the stanza :

And some are still with us concerning

Whose perils we think with dismay,

For, unless snatched like brands from the burning,

These words were unspoken today —

lines that brought out a round of laughter and
applause from '69 at its Presentation Day exercises in
the Old Chapel. That class poem and one other "Bull
Doggerel" delivered at one of the old-fashioned
Thanksgiving Jubilees and appearing in the Yale
Literary Magazine of December, 1867, were the only
times — as Mr. Bagg himself certifies in a later commu-
nication to his class — when his muse dropped into
print. In his "Bull Doggerel," a Hudibrastic effusion
carrying considerable humor, he attests his own lack
of poetic fancy in the lines :

Most rhymesters have to talk about the "Muse"
And "inspiration" and that sort of thing,
That they may satisfy the common views
And "mystery" about their verses fling.

THE TIMES OF BAGG 151

They never mention old John Walker's name
Nor yet his rhyming lexicon so true,
Though on his help hang all their hope for fame
And, like enough, their "inspiration" too.

Of rightly giving praise I am not chary

And so the credit of my verse is due

My Bull Dorg and my rhyming dictionary.

His tendency to minor, if not trivial, statistics is indi-
cated by his stated record of 160 pages out of 488 in
the volume of the Yale Literary Magazine when he
was editor; and by such entries as "wrote class poem
for Presentation Day 403 lines/' and "220,000 words
in Four Years at Yale."

That work, his opus magnum in more senses than
one, containing 713 pages, he published two years after
graduation and was in those days dubbed by Bagg
"An Encyclopaedia of College Life," and, within Yale
bounds, merits that title. "Four Years at Yale"
connoted a mountain of toil not merely in such matters
of research as the confirmation of names and dates,
but in its collation of a myriad of facts relating to the
undergraduate life at Yale and student activities on
and off the Campus told under three divisions :
(i) "The Society System"; (2) "The Student Life,"
and (3) "The Official Curriculum," each division
having its separate chapters numbering altogether
fifteen, besides a chapter of introduction and a final
one of all-round comment — a kind of epitomized
summary by the author of his personal opinion on
some of the larger problems of Yale life. It is
emphatically one of those volumes that come out of
the long silences and from the midnight oil. Its im-

152 YALE YESTERDAYS

print, "Charles C. Chatfield and Co.," has its own
reminiscence.

Mr. Chatfield, a graduate of Yale in 1866 and dying
ten years later, soon after graduation established, on
apparently very inadequate capital, a publishing house
in New Haven under the ambitious title of "The
University Publishing House," and printed therein a
good many Yale books. He was kindly and well-
meaning, but inexperienced as a publisher and too care-
less in his enterprises — traits that led to early bank-
ruptcy. Bagg himself has told us in print how, after
two New York publishers had turned down "Four
Years at Yale," Mr. Chatfield, "with an enormous
capacity for accepting all sorts of doubtful jobs, reck-
lessly accepted my offered volume without so much as
reading a line of it," and how he (Bagg) found out
that it "was one of the rules of the University Publish-
ing House that no cash taken in should ever be paid
out on any possible pretext." The terms of publication
left small residuum for the laborious author. An
edition of 1,700 was to be printed. Of these, 200
were to be distributed to "literary editors" — if they
have them still they can get from ten to twenty dollars
each. The next 800 copies were to be sold for the
exclusive profit of the publisher; and the final 700
copies were to be sold for the joint benefit of publisher
and author — the share of the latter to be 10 per cent.
"Hence," says Bagg, "even if the entire 1,700 copies
had been promptly disposed of my cash reward would
have been $175 and the possible sale of a second
edition of 1,000 copies would have brought in $250
more."

What next came to pass was the bankruptcy of the
University Publishing House, after, as Mr. Bagg says,

THE TIMES OF BAGG 153

it had made a profit of some $400 or $500 out of his
book, and from the ruined house directly Bagg secured
no cash. But from the receiver he obtained some un-
bound copies of "Four Years at Yale," which a New
York publisher brought out later as a "second edition,"
returning in the end to the author "a little more than
$175" as reward for his big task.

The house of Chatfield must not be dismissed with-
out brief added reference. It was the publisher of
The College Courant, a weekly periodical, half maga-
zine and half newspaper, covering, in imperfect
fashion, the doings of all American colleges and of
which Bagg was, for a time, one of the editors. The
same tottering firm fathered also — and owned — the
weekly undergraduate Yale Courant. And it was in a
measure the outcome of the partly successful insistence
of the publisher that the undergraduate editors should
"take their pay in books" from his bookstore, instead
of the contractual cash, that led (1872) to revolt and
the founding of the rival Yale Record under separate
student ownership and control.

In the closing chapter of "Four Years at Yale,"
under the head of "A Matter of Opinion," with its
analysis and forecasts on college problems, it is inter-
esting to see how the author anticipates later academic
thought. He favors the prep school, with its stimulus
to self-reliance, as the medium for the college "fit";
believes that many Freshmen enter College too soon
and that even twenty years of age is not too old;
criticises too great Faculty emphasis laid on classroom
marks, and too little on the elevating outside activity
and on the frictional education of the student brushing
against his mates; and there is a vein of prophecy in
his forecast of the elective system, then dimly

154 YALE YESTERDAYS

descried: uThe worst effect of optional studies is to
destroy class unity."

Final allusion might be made to the picturesque and
varied life of Bagg between his "Four Years at Yale"
and his passing on — in particular, perhaps, to his
"26,694 miles on a bicycle" of the ancient big-wheel
type held fast to by him as he playfully explained
"because 46 inch wheel signifies the year of my birth."
But the limitation here is to the Bagg of his Campus
epoch and to the abiding work that he penned. He
wrote his book at just the right time — when the college
life proper was at or very near its climax, when it had
not been modified by the broader work of the Univer-
sity, and when almost all of the old customs and
institutions still either survived or were things of
recent and personal memory. Such a book is an
integral part of Yale history and loses none of its
value as the product of the odd personality of its
author who, through many shifts of a literary life
work, never relaxed his academic fealties.

Ill

AN EARLY UNDERGRADUATE GENIUS

Almost hidden away in the massive tome "Yale
College," printed in 1879, is a sketch of the brief and
brilliant life of Ebenezer Porter Mason of the Class
of 1839, wno survived his graduation but a year and
a little more. The short biography of the young genius
of the class and College appears in the chapter on
Professor Denison Olmsted — one of the grandest of
Yale's "grand old men" — written by the late Professor
Chester S. Lyman. In a little faded and stained
volume published in 1842, Professor Olmsted himself
has told more in extenso the life tale of one who, as a
student, was probably the most gifted and versatile of
Yale's younger sons; who, ere he graduated, had won
fame on two continents as an astronomer and whose
early passing just at the threshold of a great career no
philosophy can prevent from seeming sad and strange.
Many graduates of Yale have won eminence either
within her walls or in the world at large; here was one
who in his far-away time had attained it already as a
youthful undergraduate. Yet because his career was
so brief, he is all but unknown except to the very oldest
of surviving alumni and by many of them but dimly
remembered. To rescue such a character from
academic oblivion is a task of justice to his memory,
of interest as a story in itself, and depicts a picturesque
personal episode in Yale annals.

156 YALE YESTERDAYS

Ebenezer Porter Mason was born in Washington,
Conn., December 7, 1819, son of the Rev. Stephen
Mason, sometime Congregational pastor in that town,
whose family name at least suggests the rich Puritan
and Colonial blood of the famous Captain John
Mason, leader in Colonial affairs and victor in the
campaign against the Pequots. There were omens in
Mason's infant life of his powers to come. As a
creeper upon the household rug, he traced out colors,
textures and forms. At two years of age, his chief
diversion was books. At three years, he was picking
out letters of the alphabet and forming short words
and sentences; and ere four years had gone, he was
"reading the Bible with remarkable fluency and
propriety before he had even seen a common spelling
book," and this after the loss of his mother, his first
instructor, who died when he was three years old. As
Mason's early years go on, the signs of his mental
gifts multiply, though he was restrained from head-
work, as far as possible, by his relatives, who saw the
need of upbuilding a fragile body. He wrote at seven
years a letter perfectly punctuated and spelled which
would not have discredited a youth of twice his age,
and played a good game of chess, and a year or two
later he had mastered the mechanics of a steam
engine; was a past-master of Colburn's arithmetic and
reading with zest Bacon's "Novum Organum." Pro-
fessor Olmsted says, "Even then few persons equalled
him in the facility with which he made his calculations,
especially in fractions." At school, he led his classes
in all studies by a wide gap, at twelve years of age
he was correcting the teacher in mathematics and was
practically fitted to enter Yale two years ahead of the
prescribed entering age of a Freshman.

AN EARLY UNDERGRADUATE GENIUS 157

Young Mason's early taste for poetry developed
almost as soon as his love for mathematics and at
thirteen his muse was well fledged. To that early
period belongs a series of poems of remarkable excel-
lence for so young a versifier. Among them were
translations of the ^Eneid, of which this is a sample
of his paraphrase in rhyme of the Combat of ^Eneas
and Turnus :

Meanwhile Aeneas, watching close his foe,
Lifts high his spear, to Turnus boding woe,
And hurls it from afar. The weapon sped,
Nor could the flight of swift-shot rocks exceed,
Or thunderbolts of Jove. The fatal spear,
Like blackening tempest flew, with ruin dire,
Pierced through his armor and his seven-fold shield,
And then transfixed his thigh. Now forced to yield,
With bended knee to earth great Turnus falls,
And groans are heard from the Rutulian walls.
The mountains wail with sorrow at the wound
And all the groves with Turnus' fate resound.

This reference to the star group, Orion, written in
later years, reveals also Mason's poetical mood:

And when the star-mailed giant

A blaze of glory sheds,

And high in heaven defiant

His lion mantle spreads,

I watch his mighty form uprear,

As spurning earth with hoof of air,

He mounts upon the whirling sphere,

And walks in solemn silence there.

I watch him in his slow decline

Until to Ocean's hall restored

He bathes him in the welcome brine

And the wave sheathes his burning sword.

Mason taught school for a time on Nantucket
Island; finished his preparation for Yale at Ellington,

158 YALE YESTERDAYS

Conn., and entered the College at the age of sixteen,
in the Class of 1839.

At the very outset of his Freshman year, Mason's
gift in mathematics excited the wonder of the instruc-
tors. He extracted cube roots of large numbers off-
hand and solved quickly uin his head" problems in
algebraic equations of considerable intricacy. He won
the first prize in a contest for the solution of prize
problems, doing many of them by various and original
methods. He ranked high in general scholarship and
continued to do so through his whole college life, was
an excellent writer, and an essay of his contrasting
Cicero with Demosthenes as well as his Junior oration
attracted special attention. But the feature of his
college course was his achievement in astronomy.
Earlier proclivities in that branch of science were
deepened by association with a classmate, Hamilton
Lanphere Smith, owner of a good telescope, himself
of strong astronomical bent and in after life professor
of that branch at Kenyon and Hobart colleges. He
and Mason were a kind of brace of "heavenly twins"
in astronomy outside the classroom. Smith and Mason,
beginning with the raw materials and melting them for
the speculum in their anthracite stove, made a telescope
through which they resolved six of the double stars;
and two years later, co-working, they made the largest
and, in some respects, the best telescope then in the
country. Their first telescope was set on the platform
above the portico of the Old Chapel, where, in the
upper part, Mason, for convenience to his beloved
instrument, afterwards chose his room. What that
room was, let this description in a letter of Mason
certify:

AN EARLY UNDERGRADUATE GENIUS 159

"If you want to picture to yourself an agreeable
situation, just form an image of mine. Softly body
it forth with warm fancy's rapturous touch. Imprimis,
a room occupied before me by a notoriously dissipated
fellow, as likewise a tobacco-chewer of the first
order — and a sheetiron stove consequently nearly
rusted through and floor delightfully variegated.
Secondly, prospect from it the bricks of North College,
with a view of the washroom windows of three stu-
dents, all at the comfortable distance of eight feet —
both buildings rising high above so as to exclude all
but a narrow line of sky — room consequently as dark
and shady as any grotto of the Nymphs or Muses.
Thirdly, chimney of such construction that the stove
has no draught, employing me every morning for an
hour in kindling a fire which can be effected only by
keeping all windows raised during the process of
burning about eight or a dozen newspapers and blow-
ing the rest of the time at the charcoal — I mistake —
not every morning — every fourth morning, I should
have said, for I look around and live on my friends
the rest of the time. Thus, in winter, light is to be
obtained close at the window and warmth close by
the fire — an indubitable proof that light and heat are
not inseparable. In summer, however, when the sun
shines hot upon the opposite bricks of North College,
heat but not light is afforded in such quantities as to
make it hot enough for a New Zealander. I want to
write more, but I am sitting at seven o'clock in the
morning in my cold room without a fire which I have
not the courage to attempt to kindle."

Maintaining always a high rank in general class-
room work, harassed by debt — he was supported
through College by friends and relatives at the South —

i6o YALE YESTERDAYS

frail in body and already carrying the symptoms of
consumption — the astronomical achievements of the
undergraduate Mason were almost incredible. They
included most accurate and original delineation of the
nebulae with a memoir and charts filling fifty octavo
pages of the "American Philosophical Transactions" —
a work which drew praise from Sir John Herschel and
was for years an astronomical classic; original compu-
tations of the orbits of double stars; telescopic obser-
vations on shooting stars; and a vast number of minor
observations and notes or memoirs upon them. This
was his work as an undergraduate. In the year follow-
ing his graduation, with health quite undermined,
besides other extensive astronomical work, he prepared
an elaborate mathematical treatise of a hundred and
forty octavo pages on practical astronomy besides
doing the astronomical work of the United States
Government Survey between the Maine boundary and
Canada. Professor Olmsted's tribute: "Mason,
young as he was, at the time of his death, was clearly
entitled to rank among the first astronomers of
America," stands with its statement. Not least among
his remarkable powers was his deftness and skill as
a draftsman, while in penmanship, he could write in
half a dozen different styles, clear as copperplate, and
varied, when he chose, by many forms of graceful pen-
work ornamentation. It is something more solid than
a tradition of his relatives in Litchfield County, Conn.,
that he scorned the use of ruler and dividers, and that
his lines and circles drawn offhand could hardly be
distinguished from those made with the aid of
instruments.

Besides his amazing mental gifts, as scientist, artist,
writer, mechanic and poet, Mason had a lovable and

AN EARLY UNDERGRADUATE GENIUS 161

winsome personality. He was buoyant in temper,
dutiful, unselfish, modest, grateful for kindnesses and,
though compelled by his work to be somewhat of a
recluse, was naturally a good comrade and classmate.
In frame and face he had to the end the look of a
delicate boy.

He died suddenly at the last near Richmond, Va.,
on December 26, 1840, a year and a few months after
graduation at Yale, the victim of consumption, which
had afflicted him for three years, aggravated by an
ailment of the stomach. Professor Olmsted, his
biographer, tells of his own many vain attempts to
persuade Mason to heed warnings against wintry open-
air exposure in astronomical work — yet, in the modern
light on tuberculosis, it may have been that very
exposure which prolonged his life. And it is a bit of
pathetic irony on the words of Professor Olmsted that
in later years, four of his own sons, after brilliant work
at Yale, died soon after graduation like young Mason
and all of the same disease as his.

IV
A THEOLOGICAL MARTYR

Almost every Yale class, whether a class in being
or extinct, has had its gaps that mark the quenching
ere graduation of some promising light. There have
been the gaps by death, by domestic mishap, by loss
of health, and now and then the eclipse of some shining
light by Faculty decree, just or unjust. In the class
list of 1743 of the Triennial Catalogue, then Latinized,
now Quinquennial and Anglified, one of these gaps
is found where should stand the name of David
Brainerd, victim of the Faculty, yet not, perhaps, so
much the sacrifice to narrow and misguided Yale
authority as of the theological time in which he lived.
His name is now all but forgotten in Yale annals; the
vast majority even of the graduates who have passed
their half-century class reunion have never heard his
name nor read it; but, rescued from the shades of a
century and three-quarters ago, it outlines not merely
a striking personality but an episode very sensational
in its time and out of which a great sister university
may have been born.

David Brainerd, sixth child in a family of nine sons
and daughters of Hezekiah Brainerd of Haddam,
Conn., was born April 20, 1718, in a household whose
family struck roots deep in the old Puritan soil and
then and since has stood for one of the strongest kin
groups in New England genealogy. Losing both his
parents in early life, he lived for some years with

A THEOLOGICAL MARTYR 163

relatives in East Haddam, next labored in the near
township of Durham on a farm, which had come to
him from his father's estate. But, spurred by mental
ambition and the religious emotions and currents which
in those days set so strongly toward the ministry,
through the college training, he decided to enter Yale,
fitting for college, as was the custom in that far-away
and simpler academic period, with a clergyman, Rev.
Phinehas Fiske, pastor of the Haddam church, and
later studying with his brother, Nehemiah, Yale 1723,
pastor of a church in Glastonbury, Conn. Even in that
early manhood, his piety was profound and his reli-
gious feeling intense. He himself tells how he read
his Bible through twice a year, of hours passed daily
in prayer, of moods of religious gloom, of long soul
wrestlings, and of final assurance of grace. And it was
probably this acute, almost morbid, depth of his reli-
gious nature that led to the academic tragedy in his
undergraduate life.

He entered Yale at the age of twenty-one in Septem-
ber, 1739, with the Class of 1743, was attentive and
faithful in college duties, in scholarship one of the
first, if not foremost in his class, a fervent leader in
religious activities. But his bedrock piety seems to
have been veined by a spirit of assertiveness and an
outspoken quality which was to lead to his under-
graduate undoing.

It was a time of great religious tension in which the
College shared and in which young Brainerd took
active part and gathered around him a group of kin-
dred spirits, for, as President Jonathan Edwards says,
"mutual conversation and assistance in spiritual things."
During his Junior year one evening in the College hall,
after Mr. Whittlesey, one of the tutors, had delivered

i6'4 YALE YESTERDAYS

a prayer, the subject of Mr. Whittlesey's religious
character became the topic of talk between Brainerd
and two or three of his friends, evoking from Brainerd
the criticism that "he (Whittlesey) has no more grace
than this chair." A Freshman chanced to catch the
words. Next, cherchez la femme, it is a woman who
enters the tale to whom the Freshman went and
babbled the incident; and she, in turn, hies with it to
President Clap. The President summons the Fresh-
man, calls next to the inquisition Brainerd's friends to
whom the remark was made, finds the facts and orders
Brainerd to make public confession in the hall and ask
pardon. Brainerd refuses on the ground that he should
not be held responsible for words uttered in private
talk. His case is further deepened by disobedience of
an order of the President against attending a meeting
of "Separatists" — a body of seceders from the main
church, who at that time were creating in the colony
much civic and ecclesiastical discord. The Faculty
joined with President Clap in a serious view of Brain-
erd's acts and he was formally expelled from the
College. He came on for the Commencement at which
his classmates took their degrees, and the day after
wrote a humble letter to President Clap and the
Faculty, acknowledging his fault. But he never got
his degree.

It is but just to President Clap and his Trustees of
the College to point out that they were but actors —
though zealous and leading actors — in an acrimonious
religious period due to the Separatist movement during
which the Colonial legislature of Connecticut enacted
severe penal statutes aimed at the secession; and it may
be added that it was his sympathetic and cooperative
relation in church matters with the lawmakers, which

A THEOLOGICAL MARTYR 165

he utilized shrewdly in obtaining the Yale charter of
1745, and also the first state grants for Connecticut
Hall. Such was the bitterness of the feeling of which
Sparks' "American Biography" (1830) tells us, in its
several chapters of the life story of Brainerd, that
when Brainerd came to the Commencement of his
class, he found himself in danger of arrest if publicly
seen on the street, was forced to lodge with a friend
outside the town and passed Commencement day in
solitary prayer in the woods. As another attest of
the academic fanaticism of the times, three or four
years later two pious undergraduates, John and
Ebenezer Cleaveland, were summarily expelled from
Yale after refusing public confession of sin for attend-
ing, with their parents, a Separatist meeting at home
during vacation.

Thus far it has been but the narrative, in the main,
of the old-time theological severity visiting with its
penalty an undergraduate offender. The sequel opens
a much larger historical question: Was Brainerd' s
expulsion the mainspring of Princeton College?

The Rev. David Dudley Field of Haddam, member
of the historical societies of Connecticut, Massachu-
setts and Pennsylvania, father of the four "great"
Fields — Cyrus, layer of the first Atlantic cable, David
Dudley, mighty in the law, Stephen, associate justice
of the United States Supreme Court, and Henry,
writer and editor — expounds the Princeton hypothesis
through several pages of his "Brainerd Genealogy,"
printed in 1857. Dr. Field tells us how the great
Jonathan Edwards, who was to be president of
Princeton, resented the severity of the Yale rulers and
pleaded with them hard but in vain; how there were
many eminent clergymen who sympathized with

166 YALE YESTERDAYS

Brainerd and among them "Rev. Jonathan Dickinson,
pastor of the church at Elizabethtown, N. J., and the
Rev. Aaron Burr, pastor of the church in Newark, who
also pleaded for Brainerd before the authorities of
Yale College, in behalf of the Society for the Propaga-
tion of Christian Knowledge in Foreign Parts, which
had appointed him their missionary." And how Judge
John Dickinson of Connecticut, nephew of Jonathan,
had declared to him (Dr. Field) "that the establish-
ment of Princeton College was owing to the sympathy
felt for David Brainerd because the authorities of
Yale College would not give him his degree and that
the plan of the college was drawn up in his (Judge
Dickinson's) father's house." Dr. Field adds: "I
am certain that I have declared the precise fact that
Judge Dickinson uttered. Nor is this the whole proof
of the fact. There is evidence that the Rev. Aaron
Burr said, after the rise of Princeton College, that it
would never have come into existence but for the
expulsion of David Brainerd from Yale College. It
is a significant fact that three of the men who were
conspicuous in their efforts and sympathy for Brainerd
were the first three presidents of Princeton College —
Jonathan Dickinson, Aaron Burr, Yale 1735, and

Jonathan Edwards, Yale 1720 Brainerd was

expelled in the latter part of 1742 and Princeton

College received pupils soon after All the

members of the New York Synod were warmly
attached to Brainerd and friendly to Princeton
College."

As a sidelight on the Princeton theorem, one finds
that the Rev. Samuel Finley, afterwards president of
Princeton College, was, under the anti-Separatist
statute of Connecticut, twice arrested and carried out

A THEOLOGICAL MARTYR 167

of the state as a vagrant for preaching in seceding
churches.

There rests the Princeton hypothesis of evil turned
to good and the indiscretion of a Yale Freshman and
the gossiping tongue of a New Haven woman sowing
the seeds of the great New Jersey university. For the
rest, it is the brief narrative of the short but exalted
lifework of David Brainerd himself as preacher and
missionary — a tale which fills a bulky printed volume
of the great Edwards himself, though chiefly made up
of Brainerd's diary. Not long after his expulsion from
Yale, he went into mission work among the Indians
along the upper Delaware River and continued in that
labor after his failure to secure his Yale degree. Infirm
of body, he yet labored incessantly and zealously and
won respect and fame in the pulpit and as a mission
worker. Says Dr. Field: uThe amount of labor which
he performed in the brief period of his public life,
considering how feeble he was and how much he suf-
fered by sickness, is absolutely astonishing." Mean-
while he had become engaged to Jerusha Edwards,
daughter of the great theologian, but their marriage
never came, and October 9, 1747, in Northampton,
Mass., he passed away at the age of twenty-nine. Such
was the esteem in which he was held that a hundred
years after, during a session of the General Association
of Massachusetts at Northampton, the members in a
body visited his grave and, standing around it, listened
to an address on his character and labors. In the
class list of 1743 the aching void where his name
should be still remains.

His name, the sad and unjust academic fate which
overtook him, and his bright but brief life are recalled
in our day by the recent bequest of $65,000 to the Yale

i68 YALE YESTERDAYS

Medical School by the late Cyprian S. Brainerd, Yale
'50, of Haddam, direct descendant of Hezekiah, father
of the Yale martyr to the sectarian authority of the old
days.

V
IK MARVEL, PROSE-POET

In his familiar nom de plume of "Ik Marvel," in
his written words which so often depict with quaint
and tender realism the sunny side of New England
life, and in the subtle Yankee flavor which penetrates
his lines, one can descry with something very near to
certitude the New England extraction of Donald
Grant Mitchell and infer that the roots of his family
tree struck deep in the richest Puritan soil.

Young Mitchell, a nine-year-old boy, was at school
in Ellington, Conn., when his father died in 1831 and
the lad remained there until he entered Yale College
in the Class of 1841.

The college records show no high proficiency in
Mitchell's scholarship and his name appears in neither
the Junior Exhibition nor the Commencement lists.
But his literary bent in College is attested by his
election as an editor of the Yale Literary Magazine
and his position as class orator. Moreover, he was
popular among his mates, a class leader, and, in his
Senior year, a member of Skull and Bones ; and through
his life in classroom, in the Old Brick Row and on the
Campus the roots of loyalty to Yale struck deep, as
attested by his devotion to her in after life. Pen-
pictures of his college days often were drawn into his
literary field.

He held for a while the American consulship at
Venice and after his return in 1855, bought, two miles

170 YALE YESTERDAYS

West of New Haven, the "Edgewood" farm, which
at once became a part of his personality in letters.
There he lived in close rapport with nature, an ardent
devotee of the field, forest and garden, almost
a recluse in general habit, yet with a kindly wel-
come for old friends. During his life at Edgewood
and outside of his literary tasks, he did some semi-
professional work in landscape gardening and was
not infrequently consulted as an expert in laying
out public and private grounds — New Haven being
especially indebted to him for the designs of her East
Rock Park. Otherwise almost his only emergence
from the close retirement of Edgewood was to
deliver a few courses of lectures, to make a trip to
Paris in 1878 as United States Commissioner to the
World's Exhibition, to be one of the judges of indus-
trial art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 at Phila-
delphia, and to serve as a member of the Council of
the Yale Art School, a place which he held continuously
after 1865 until the Council was abolished in 1898.
Almost his last appearance in public was his reading
in the Corporation Room at Woodbridge Hall during
Yale's Bicentennial week, of his sketch of that
ancestral Woodbridge after whom the building is
named. Sitting in the Yale President's chair — for the
infirmity of age did not let him stand — he read a paper
which those who heard pronounced the gem of the
many bicentennial addresses. He received in 1878 the
honorary degree of LL.D. from his University.

Mr. Mitchell's larger literary work began with his
contribution to the Albany Cultivator of letters from
Europe during his first trip, followed soon after by a
series of sketches, the sequels of his travel in the
Southern states. The result of his second trip to

DONALD G. MITCHELL
IK MARVEL

AND

His HOME AT
EDGEWOOD

IK MARVEL, PROSE-POET 171

Europe was made public in his "Fresh Gleanings from
the Old Fields of Europe" and his "Battle Summer,
or Paris in 1848," the former giving a prelude of his
lucid simplicity of style, the latter showing that the
rage of mad Paris was a subject ill adapted to his
gentle pen. In his then anonymous work for The
Lorgnette, the young writer showed also that satire
was too heavy and harsh a weapon for him to lift in
scoring the foibles of men even in the thin soil of
fashionable society.

It was not until about a year later that Mitchell
struck his own most characteristic vein in his "Reveries
of a Bachelor," the first of them printed to divert sus-
picion, by its shifting of style, from the authorship of
the articles in The Lorgnette. The earlier "Reveries"
appeared first in the Southern Literary Messenger,
afterwards were reprinted at the South and a little
later (October, 1580) they reappeared in the fifth
number and first volume of Harper's Magazine. It is
an interesting literary fact that when, a year or two
later, Mitchell offered the completed manuscript of
"The Reveries" to the publishing firm of Ticknor &
Fields it refused the work and thus lost one of the
most profitable American volumes. Two years after
(1854) came the companion volume, "Dream Life."

In his home at Edgewood, made so familiar in his
writings, Mr. Mitchell for more than fifty years lived
in touch with nature, so close and loving that but for
his ardor of the field and garden, more prolific labor
would probably have been done by his pen. His
affection for outdoor life was a passion and every phase
and form of it was a familiar thing. He knew the lays
of the birds, the "rustle of the bladed corn," the
mysteries of plant life, and, until cumbered by age,

172 YALE YESTERDAYS

delighted much in long tramps which made his figure —
robust, strong, white-haired, with lineaments blending
poetic classicism with the cherubic heartiness of the
English squire — well known on the country highways
for miles around his home. The writer of this sketch
recalls vividly a visit to Edgewood years ago when
Mitchell pointed out on his library table a group of
the pyramidal shoots of the quasi vulgar "skunk's
cabbage" transplanted to a jar and surrounded by
moss — the prose-poet pleasantly expounding how that
abused plant, first outpost of the spring, only became
assertive — like some of human kind — when molested
and downtrodden. It is said of him that he delighted
more in a paper on some rural theme penned for an
agricultural journal and ill-paid or not paid for at all
than in his articles written for the great magazines,
and the highest agricultural critics have testified to
the accuracy of his observations on the lore of the
farm — a trait which, when a young man, won him a
second prize for a plan of farm buildings offered by
the New York State Agricultural Society. To his
absorbing love of the fields is doubtless to be attributed
certain long gaps in his literary work, which his friends
have frequently commented upon ere he drifted into
his serene old age. In politics, Mr. Mitchell was a
Democrat of the "Old Line" type but took no active
part in public affairs.

VI
THE WESTMINSTER OF YALE

The history of Yale, as College and University, has
reached through two centuries and more. The history
of Grove Street Cemetery has reached through over
one century. There was thus almost a century during
a period when it was a hard and unpleasant task to
carry the college dead away from New Haven, and
when they passed from life to the old semicircular
burying ground that filled an area of several acres in
the center of New Haven Green and covered the site
on which Center Church now stands. Thus Yale owns,
in fact, two Westminsters, an old and, relatively
speaking, a new. The older Westminster on the Green
still holds the sacred dust of many of her earlier
graduates, some of them not without renown. But
when, in 1821, their memorials were removed to the
burial lots in the "God's Acre" on Grove Street, the
two Westminsters, in every outward sense, may be said
to have merged in one.

In the first beginnings of the Grove Street burying
ground, as well as in what may be called the transition
period between it and the ancient churchyard on the
Green, the name and influence of Yale figure con-
spicuously. It was James Hillhouse, Yale 1773,
Treasurer of the College, member of the lower house
of Congress, United States Senator, and commemo-
rated in New Haven not merely by her stately plant
of elms, but by many other tokens of public munificence
and enterprise, who first suggested the purchase in

174 YALE YESTERDAYS

1796 of the field of six acres on which, as a basic plot,
the larger Grove Street Cemetery has been built up;
and joined with him were thirty-one citizens of the
town, many of whose names are to be found starred
on the Yale Triennial. A little later the six acres were
increased to ten for the purpose, as the old record
recites, of obtaining a burial ground "larger, better
arranged for the accommodation of families, and by
its retired situation, better calculated to impress the
mind with a solemnity becoming the repository of the
dead." Mr. Hillhouse had, at first, planned a family
burying ground on his own property. But happening
to see the neglect into which a private burying ground
once belonging to a branch of his house had fallen in
the ownership of strangers, he planned the new burial
place with its special provision for family lots and
said to be the first of its kind on our continent. It
was due, undoubtedly, to this provision that the Yale
dead in the cemetery have, to a considerable number,
been grouped in the two "college lots" so-called.
Each of the thirty-two founders, with James Hill-
house at the head, subscribed fourteen dollars for
purchase money and expenses; and, a year later
(1797), they were made a corporation by the Connec-
ticut General Assembly.

At the first meeting of the new corporation lots
were gratuitously set apart "one to the President and
Fellows of Yale College, one to each of the Eccle-
siastical Societies then existing, one for the burial of
strangers dying in the city, three for the poor who
should die not owning lots, and one to people of
color" ; and, a year after, a lot was given to President
Dwight of Yale and another lot to Professor Meigs,
who had aided in surveying the ground. In that sur-

THE WESTMINSTER OF YALE 175

vey, it may be added, a young graduate of the Class
of 1795, Jeremiah Day, afterwards to be President
of Yale, carried the chain.

The first college lot is a few rods immediately to
the right of the present entrance and must have been
nearly in front of the old gateway to the ground. The
lot is an irregular oblong in shape, some sixty-five feet
in length and averaging perhaps twenty feet in width.
With fitting symbolism it is aligned with the lots given
to the New Haven churches, attesting, as it would
seem not by accident, the spiritual blood which flowed
through the academic veins. Church and College were
together in life, and in death they were not divided.
It is more singular that in the living Yale's march
northward the old college lot is now brought almost
under the eaves of the great Dining Hall, the lineal
successor of the tempestuous Commons of the eight-
eenth century and not without some recent troubles of
its own.

The lot is crowded with Yale monuments, some
twenty-five in number, and none of them recent. Not
one of them is striking or ornate, but many of them
are dignified, whether recumbent or reared in that
familiar ancestral type of ubox" monument — made of
slabs and hollow within — in which the rectangular
apex crests the thick, low shaft; and all are nicely
aligned and their shapes, cut in coarse but enduring
marble, well preserved. As a whole the ancient
academic plot, while meager as to its area, is impres-
sive. Its mortuary keynotes are tenax propositi,
endurance, consistency, and the rigid unyielding traits
of the Yale ancestors who, each under his somber and
inflexible stone, seem ready to rise up and, like Colonel
Newcome, say adsum when his name is called.

176 YALE YESTERDAYS

Of the Yale Presidents, all who bore that title —
Clap, Daggett, Stiles, Dwight, Day, Woolsey, and
Porter — either lie buried in Grove Street Cemetery
or have their monuments within its bounds. Of these
only the monument of Stiles is in the old college lot,
though President Dwight rests in the original family
lot adjoining and a few feet away. The stone of
Yale's second titular President, Naphtali Daggett, in
the family lot, a few rods to the northward, bears the
simplest of inscriptions, recording merely his birth,
death, pastorship of the church at Smithtown, L. I.,
his professorship of divinity and his college presidency.
Not so the more ambitious stone in the college lot of
President Stiles, erected by the Corporation to Yale's
many-sided administrator and the intellectual democrat
of his time, whose inscription in prolix Latin, tells us
of honors, fame, greatness in church and in learning
and "Per terras honore habitus" who passed away
"Lacrymis Omnium" Hard by is the stone of D.
Jabez Backus, student in the College, dying at the age
of seventeen, a little more than a year before President
Stiles, who gave the Latin for the epitaph of a youth
"Subita morte peremptus" after a short life, promising
rich fruits. Striking the same note of undergraduate
pathos is the monument to "Alfred E. Clarke, Point
Coupee, Louisiana," a Junior in the College. The dim
letters tell how "strangers watched the death-bed of
this loved youth and wept over his early grave," while
"his bereaved parents in a distant land anticipate with
hope the glorious morning when the grave shall give
up their dead." The most ambitious stone in the
enclosure is a large red stone sarcophagus, which in the
briefest terms records "N. Smith, Professor of Medi.
and Surgery in Yale College" — a man whose fame,

THE WESTMINSTER OF YALE 177

as pioneer in his science, does not suffer because
unlettered in Latin superlatives.

Around one stone in the ancient lot hang the sad
memories of a college tragedy. The marble tells of
the death in 1 843 of Tutor John Breed Dwight, Yale
1840, a grandson of the first President Dwight, and
the story of whose death is unwritten in the Yale
histories and is only told in the dingy files of the local
newspapers of the time. On the night of September
30, 1843, there was a disturbance on the Campus
caused by an attack of Sophomores on Freshmen. The
students were dispersed by the authorities, but a little
later a group of Sophomores gathered to renew the
fray. Young Dwight tried to quell the disturbance,
and while drawing a young Sophomore, seventeen years
old, toward a light for identification, was stabbed twice
by him in the thigh with a dirk knife. The Sophomore,
son of a wealthy Philadelphian, fled to his home and
was forthwith expelled from the College. Tutor
Dwight's wounds were not deemed dangerous and were
almost healed when fever set in and he died on October
20. The Sophomore came back to stand trial, and,
after a preliminary hearing — in which Doctor Knight,
the attending surgeon, testified in doubtful terms as
to the connection between the wounds and the fever —
was bound over under $5,000 bonds for trial in the
following January on the charge of assault with intent
to murder. Illness was pleaded for non-appearance
at the January term, the bond was forfeited and there
the record ends, save only a set of resolutions of the
Sophomore Class regretting the act and declaring that,
as a class, it will "frown" on the carrying of concealed
weapons.

With the new burial ground in use, the old church-

178 YALE YESTERDAYS

yard on the Green fell into disuse and into unsightly
shabbiness, and the question of a transfer of its stones
to the Grove Street lot was mooted actively. That the
plan found its foes is proved in the faded leaflets which
tell of a meeting in the New Haven County House
May 31, 1815, to protest against any intrusion on
the old graves by the foundations of the new Center
Church, and "178 persons, the remains of whose kin-
dred have been deposited in said ground," register their
plea against encroachment and promise to "adopt and
forward means for a suitable enclosure about the
ground." But seven years later the old burying ground
being "wholly neglected," the city itself acted. It
bought three acres more on Grove Street, gave — in the
northwest corner of the cemetery — a new lot to the
College, and on June 26, 1821, began with solemn
ceremonial the transit of the old stones to the new
burying place. There was a characteristic service in
crowded Center Church; hymns, "Hark! from the
Tombs a doleful sound" and "How long shall Death
a tyrant reign," with a funeral address by Abraham
Bishop (Yale 1778) ; then President Day, assisted by
other college officers, began the removal of the quaint
old stones, some twenty in number, over the graves of
the undergraduate dead whose families had no other
resting places in the new grounds ; and the ancient moss-
grown slabs were set up again in the southwest corner
of the second college lot, its first and most fitting
tenants.

It is on that undergraduate corner with its humble
mementoes of Yale's young dead of the eighteenth
century, most of them forgotten even by their own
families and kin, that the eye pauses. The oldest
lichen-covered stone tells us that

THE WESTMINSTER OF YALE 179

HERE
LYES THE BODY OF

ISRAEL SON OF

HEZEKIAH BRAINERD

ASSISTANT

WHO DIED A MEMBER OF

YALE COLLEGE JAN. 6,

1748, AETATIS SUAE 23.

Flendi quae causa est

Si tantum a morte tenetur lutum,

Animam interea

Christus complectitur almus?

While the stone of Phinehas White, "Collegii Yalensis
Alumnus," who died in 1796, aged 22, passes on this
post-mortuary warning across the centuries :

Oh ! Had kind Heav'n allow'd a larger date !
So short his warning and so swift his fate
Ye young ye Gay attend this speaking stone
Think on his fate and tremble at your own

That student corner of Yale's Westminster, with its
twenty undergraduate stones of the eighteenth century,
wakens deeper pathos than the nearby Yale memorials
of the later and greater dead whose time was fully lived
out. Here the young fruit blasted, there the fruit
ripened in its fall! Vision turns back to the far-away
century and notes the average type of student life which
the old stones suggest to fancy: Perchance some lad
on the niggard New England farm fired with ambition
which overcomes the parental scruple of poverty; the
hard study, after chores, by the tallow dip; the few
months of crude Greek and Latin under the country

i8o YALE YESTERDAYS

minister; the hard struggle into College; a year or
two of faithful work; a sudden fever ill cared for; a
quick passing and then these many years of rest.

The second or greater Yale burial plot is some one
hundred feet by sixty feet in size, including an addition
made in 1835 by purchase of the College, and is partly
held in private ownership. Altogether it contains
about sixty stones, recording some of Yale's most
illustrious dead. None of the Presidents lie in the lot.
But among its sleepers are Leonard Bacon, the Nestor
of his church; the two Gibbs, father and son, the one
strong in theology, the other more mighty in mathe-
matics; Larned, in an earlier Yale time in charge of
her department of rhetoric; and Marsh, over whose
recent grave the University has placed a block of
Quincy granite which forms a lower base measuring
7 x 4^ feet. This is capped by a heavily moulded
block of red Scotch granite, and on the side facing the
street is a bronze tablet with the inscription :

OTHNIEL CHARLES MARSH,

BORN AT LOCKPORT, N. Y., OCTOBER 29, 1831,

DIED AT NEW HAVEN, NOVEMBER 18, 1899.

Professor of Paleontology in Yale University, 1866-1899.

President of National Academy of Sciences, 1883-1895.

Eminent as Explorer, Collector, and Investigator

in Science.

To Yale University he gave his Services, his
Collection, and his Estate.

In the same lot lie Birdsey Grant Northrop, Yale
1841, pioneer and promoter in New England village

THE WESTMINSTER OF YALE 181

improvement; Mary A. Goodwin, who "of African
descent gave the earnings of her life to educate men
of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel min-
istry"; and a suggestion of Yale's new ties with the
Orient appears in the stone to Kakichi Senta, who died
May 17, 1892. Hard by, just to the north of the lot,
under a large sarcophagal monument of brown stone,
rests Joseph Earl Sheffield, his grave overlooked by
the line of massive buildings of the Yale school that
bears his name.

It is a strange post-mortuary happening which has
laid almost side by side on the same street of the dead
in the southwestern part of the cemetery a group of
Yale's most famous alumni. Within a space of seventy
feet, fronting the pathway, lie Noah Webster, Yale
1778, the lexicographer; Eli Whitney, Yale 1792,
maker of the cotton-gin, whose invention swerved
American history; Lyman Beecher, Yale 1797, famed
preacher of his time and father of Beechers more
famed, who in accord with his lifelong wish was laid
by the side of Professor N. W. Taylor, Yale 1807,
herald of a new and more sunlit theology; and Noah
Porter, 1831, President of the University. Where in
this country, on a span of turf so narrow, will be found
the gravestones of a group of men so renowned? And
not far away rests Jedediah Morse, Yale 1783, father
of American geography, and, as sire of Samuel F. B.
Morse, Yale 1810, grandfather of telegraphy.

Many are the famous dead of Yale, in other parts
of her Westminster, most of them resting among their
kindred. A few rods from the striking group men-
tioned lies Theodore Winthrop, 1848, the young and
gifted novelist, who fell at Big Bethel, one of the first
of the prominent martyrs of the Civil War. The large

182 YALE YESTERDAYS

red sandstone of Yale's first titular President, uthe
Reverend and Learned Mr. Thomas Clap," letters the
virtues of one for "near 27 years Laborious and Pain-
full President of the College" and carries as annexed
and capitalized epitaph: "Death! Great Proprietor
of all, 'tis thine to tread out empires and to quench
the stars." Near the north wall, under a handsome
sarcophagus of Scotch granite, lies President Woolsey.
The stones of Whitney, Dana, Silliman and Newton
bear names eminent in learning on two continents, and
under a plain oblong of granite rests Thomas Anthony
Thacher, after "a life spent to its end in earnest and
loving work for Yale College and its students." Nor,
without the "passing tribute of a sigh," should one go
by the grave of Denison Olmsted, Yale 1813, Pro-
fessor of Natural Philosophy and active worker for
the cemetery, where he lies in sad comradeship with
five sons, all passing by consumption as young men, the
oldest counting but thirty-four years. Finally, among
Yale senators, governors and minor men of state,
should not be passed by the name of Aaron N. Skinner,
Yale 1823, four times mayor of New Haven and head
of a famous school. If Hillhouse was the founder of
Yale's Westminster, Skinner was its builder, who
rescued it from decay, who for years watched and
planned for trees, for new layouts, for the massive
wall, who designed the impressive Egyptian gateway
and whose own stately stone erected by fellow citizens,
pupils and friends deserves as fit epitaph si monu-
mentum quaris, cir cum spice.

Within the seventeen acres of the Grove Street city
of the dead are more than twelve thousand graves;
and, among their silent inmates, of those who are clari,
clariores et clarissimi Yale claims almost every one.

ATHLETICS OF YORE

I

A REVERY OF THE GAME

On sward and base line gleams the sun,
Across the field the cloud shades stray,
And airy fingers of the breeze,
Along the rustling tree-tops play.
Southward afar, o'er leafy tips,
Blend sky and sea and sun-lit ships.

No murmur from the steepled town.
No echo from the Westering hill.
Save when the silence bursts in sound
And college cry and chorus fill
The welkin, with their cheery call
To prowess of the bat and ball.

Ripples of crimson, waves of blue,
In tide of vibrant colors stream,
Where the massed faces, row on row,
Incarnate a fantastic dream
Of a great human harp, that flings
Its rival notes from quivering strings.

The pageant dims; the shoutings die.
From field and base the players fade.
What forms are these that through the mist
Of memory, sport in phantom shade?
Each at his old-time post of play,
Lo 1 the Old Nine is here today.

186 YALE YESTERDAYS

Blithe striplings then; bowed greybeards now.
For them no more the rapturous thrill,
When hard-wrung victory bent, to crown
The fielder's art; the batsman's skill,
And all the world was far away
At close of our triumphant day.

Varied the symbols we have penned,
On Time's great score card — mazy lines
Of Honor, Error, Joy and Woe,
And here and there the mystic signs
That mark how some old player sleeps,
And Death his fateful tally keeps.

The vision passes; rings again
The college cheer and echoing song.
But still the veterans wait to hear,
In sunset shadows waxing long,
The Mighty Umpire's final call
Of "out" in the last game of all.

II

GENERAL ATHLETICS IN THE SEVENTIES

The grey-haired graduate of Yale who contrasts,
mentally and visually, American college athletics today
with college sports of the early seventies sees in the
foreground much of the difference between a mechan-
ism and recreative fun. This is the main contrast.
But another difference, like unto it, was found in the
old generality of sports. Yet in the very early
seventies at Yale there were no track athletics; tennis
was at low terms; golf was undreamed of as an
American sport and known only as a term with a trans-
Atlantic echo; and, as what would be called today
major sports, there were only baseball and boating.
A throng of undergraduates usually gathered after
supper at the old boathouse hard by Tomlinson
bridge to see the Varsity Six go out and come in;
while each afternoon and evening found on the harbor
and the Quinnipiac a goodly flotilla of purely recreative
craft. The earlier rival boating clubs — the Varuna
and Glyuna — had expired. But their traditions of
boating as a sport were still strong. Within such
narrow limits there was a recreative and wide quality
that by comparison left the intense college athletic
system of these times out of sight. And, through it
all, coupled necessarily with its measure of rivalry, ran
the real fun-loving spirit of the game.

In seeking causes of that old-time athletic generality,
the bearing upon it of the "required" system of study

i88 YALE YESTERDAYS

is not to be overlooked. The rigid scheme of recita-
tions— with small dilutions of lectures in Junior and
Senior years — called for three classroom exercises a
week except for omission on Wednesday and Saturday
afternoons — the halcyon half-holidays. There was
no elective or group plan that allowed the under-
graduates so to elect courses as to reduce them to an
athletic basis and leave free several afternoons of the
week. Thus there was less actual time for athletics;
and with a recitation due for four days in the week
inexorably at five o'clock in the afternoon there was
in those four days scant time for getting one's after-
noon lesson, for the trip back and forth to the field
or boathouse and also for the practice on the diamond
or in the shell. As to boating, indeed, some of it came
after the six o'clock supper.

But the old scholastic regimen, as a promoter of
sports, had its compensations. It released the classes
for sports all at once on the bi-weekly half-holidays.
Five hundred men in the four classes were, so to
speak, synchronized for recreation if they wanted it
and the recreative habit thus was collective and inten-
sified rather than distributive and had all the force
of collective and pent-up energy. Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons with their freedom from the
classroom thus became in a sense dedicated to the habit
of recreation, while at the same time insufficient for
out-of-town absenteeism. Athletics were part of a
homogeneous scheme which brought classes together.
In any comparison of old and modern athletics at Yale
this stimulus to general recreation based on harmony
of college exercises must be allowed for. But even if
it is allowed for, the contrasts remain striking.

It is the spirit of the old sports of Yale which the

ATHLETICS IN THE SEVENTIES 189

graduate of forty years gone has of late years so sadly
missed. It may best be instanced, perhaps, in baseball,
where modern scientific play — saying nothing of com-
mercialism— has been dearly bought at the cost of the
old breeziness and all-round fun. Curved pitching and
the close play behind the bat in the early seventies had
not come in. There was one stripling, Cummings of
the Star Club of Brooklyn, who was a pioneer exponent
of the curve cleverly disguised as an underhand throw.
For the rest it was "straight arm" pitching or, more
strictly, a toss rarely of much speed. Hence free
hitting in most superlative terms, the swift grounder,
the clean "daisy cutter," the far-away rocket parabola
to the remote outfield, the frequent home run, the big
scores but with many ups and downs. At the annual
game alone was a gate fee (fifty cents) charged.
Coaches, training tables, Easter trips and the whole
costly outfit of up-to-date Yale baseball were unknown
in that amateur epoch. The recorded cost of one
whole baseball season was but $862, most of it raised
by undergraduate subscription.

That old college baseball of course lacked in modern
superfine niceties. There was no coaching from the
bench, no signals, no "squeeze" plays. But it was a
game of individualities, of self-reliance and quick
judgments. Mechanically imperfect and scientifically
immature, it had the charm of the personal equations.
And through it all ran deep the non-professional and
non-commercial motif.

Hardly second in college interest to the university
matches were those of the college classes. It was
somewhere in the later sixties that somebody, now
unremembered, gave the College a class flag to be
battled for in baseball. It was an ornate blue silk

YALE YESTERDAYS

banner bearing the college device, as now recalled,
mounted on a rosewood staff and rich in ornate frills.
No later contests with Harvard and Princeton have
brought out sharper rivalry than those which focussed
around that banner. One curious incident of the class
games for the trophy is here recalled. Our pitcher,
a bulky, round-headed and hard-headed classmate, was
hit on the head by a sharp liner straight from the bat.
The ball — "lively" in those days and more charged
with rubber than now — bounded sidewise on the fly
to the third baseman's hands and the batsman was
uout" under the rules, leaving the pitcher none the
worse.

A year or two later the champion class flag dis-
appeared from the class captain's room. Rumor and
precedent assigned it a home in one of the "tombs"
of the secret societies.

The general interest of the early seventies in out-
door recreation extended to boating. Not a few of the
undergraduates owned their single shells or pair-oars;
and the large boathouse and float just this side of
Belle Dock where rowing and sailing were for hire
depended almost entirely on student custom. "Every
boat out" was a familiar dictum of the proprietor on
any Wednesday or Saturday afternoon of balmy
weather and sunshine. With five times as many
students in Yale now as there were then is there a
public boathouse on the harbor or Lake Whitney that
can claim equal patronage?

Such memories of the Yale athletics of four decades
ago serve not only to point out the later evils, but to
welcome their coming abatement denoted by the evident
firm resolve of the Alumni Advisory board to reduce
the athletic intensities, broaden out sports for the

ATHLETICS IN THE SEVENTIES igi

undergraduate multitude, big letter pure sport and
expunge pure rivalry, and on the enlarged Yale Field
open any day recreation to the everyday man of the
Campus. The old simplicities, the limitations and the
primal spirit of the sports of the early seventies can
obviously never again be fully renewed.

Ill

REMINISCENCES OF OLD YALE BASEBALL

The New Haven of the later sixties was a relatively
small and sprawling municipality that centered thickly
along the immediate shore, around the Green and in
the region between the Green and Mill River. West-
ward, Northward and Southward it was but a step
from the Campus to spacious lots which opened them-
selves hospitably to the ball player. Among those old
sporting fields, the ancient Campus naturally holds
earliest place. From time out of mind it appears to
have been not merely an area of college play but a kind
of battlefield of Faculty and undergraduate where
authority has wrestled with the pent-up physical energy
of sportive youth tempted by greensward level ground
and nearby open spaces. As far back at least as the
year 1765 the ancient "statuta" of the College tell us
in the Latin how "Siquis Pila pedali vel palmeria, aut
globis, in area academica laserit .... multetur non
plus sex denariis et damna resarciat" which informs
us, by translation, not only that the undergraduate
played ball with foot and hand a hundred and fifty
years ago, but was interdicted as to those sports in the
college yard under penalty of making good the damage
and incurring a maximum fine of sixpence. But pre-
sumptively then, as in later times, there was latitude
in the written rule and its spirit rather than rigid form
prevailed. The undergraduate might indulge the
"laserit" but not too vigorously or on too collective a

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 193

scale; he might "pass" the hand ball but not bat it or
play matches; he might use on the Campus the antique
equivalent of "punt" but not of scrimmage or mass
play; he might be playfully recreative but not violent
or aggressive in a way to "damnify" the academic
window panes. Such ancestral policy toward Campus
sports may at any rate be inferred both from the
Campus conditions and the modern attitude of the
Faculty.

The real playground of the college youth with their
names starred long ago in the Triennial Catalogue was,
undoubtedly, the Green in the days far before asphalt
walk, lawn mowers and grass-grown restraints of the
city fathers. The tales of the mighty football scrim-
mages of Yale classes on the Green coming down as
late as the fifties attest the high function of the Green
as a minister of college sports. And fancy today may
look enviously back to the times when right at Yale's
frontal gates was a big playground barred by no decree
or limitation of time or distance.

The extinction of football on the Green in the fifties
and the rise of baseball a few years later bring the
playgrounds of the College within the sweep of direct
memory. In the sixties the city was still a contracted
municipality. There was a public swimming beach
where now stand the railroad shops, college boat races
were started under the present solidities of Seaside
Park and a brief trudge from the Campus took the
ball player South, North and West to big and free open
spaces. The nearest was the "Elm Street lot" on the
South just beyond the present Christ Church, not so
smooth as a floor nor so broad as a Western prairie,
but big enough for the democratic football play of the

194 YALE YESTERDAYS

time and for baseball in which batting ambition soared
no higher than a two-base hit.

Northward and just beyond Broadway a broader
reach of vacant lots opened, two or three of them large
enough for football; and a step farther still, was the
"Ashmun Street lot" where the University nine of that
day habitually practiced and now and then played
minor matches. The Ashmun Street ground was
hardly an ideal ball field by the modern standard; its
surface was wavy and humpy, disconcerting to fielders;
its backstop was a broken board fence shutting off some
low tenements among which high fouls dropped per-
sistently and many a ball got lost, strayed or stolen;
and to the right, across Ashmun Street, was the
cemetery into which other foul balls dropped, bounding
erratically among the tombs and entailing hard and
cooperative climb of the high stone wall. But the field
was but ten minutes' walk from the Campus, it gave
room for double ball games, it was rent free and it
served in a period when baseball training was neither
acute nor exacting and when fun and fine recreation
were at the front of college athletics.

Like unto it in quality of surface and soil but much
more expansive and also much farther away were the
"Hospital lot" just south of the New Haven Hospital
and the "Congress Avenue lot" some half a mile
beyond. Both these conditioned a brisk and pretty
long walk from the Campus. But both were available
for the half-holidays of Saturday and Wednesday
afternoons that in those days broke the stiff weekly
curriculum of required study; and both were used for
intercollegiate matches or games with leading out-of-
town nines. The Hospital lot itself, fairly level, hard-
soiled, zigzagged by footpaths, larger in area than

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 195

New Haven Green, was a vast unbroken square
expanse owning its half-dozen rough diamonds, where
almost as many matches might be in progress at once.
It and its three contemporaries on Congress Avenue,
Elm and Ashmun Streets are now lost under the thick
dwellings of the spreading city and the reminiscent eye
seeks their original bounds in vain.

It was in the last half-decade of the sixties that
Hamilton Park came to the fore as Yale's playground
and held its place until superseded by the new Yale
Field some fifteen years later. The Park, indeed,
served so long as an arena of academic skill and muscle
as to reach a kind of athletic classicism and be girt
about by rich traditions of prowess and victory. It had
two ample fields within the race track, each semi-
elliptical — often flooded and used as skating ponds o'
winters — not with sandpapered diamonds, yet level and
smooth even if tested by ideals of our present baseball
days, a half-hour's walk from the Campus and of two-
thirds that time by the sluggish horse car. An embryo
fence of a single rail demarcated the race track from the
field and marked the bound past which the hard-hit ball
assured a home run. Nor did the Park lack natural
beauty with its westward grove of chestnuts, the West-
ville hills beyond and the overlooking face of West
Rock suffused with mellow sunbeams or glooming
shade. For a number of years the rent of the Park was
nominal and all but the more important ball games free.
But on a field not held in Yale ownership, there was
no care for structural improvements, and save for a
pigmy stand behind catcher, spectators, sometimes
numbering thousands, stood or squatted in the great
human wedge paralleling the upper base lines and with
no barrier but the restraining ropes. The Yale nine

1 96 YALE YESTERDAYS

shared the Park with state professional baseball
leagues and the enclosure had its vicarious and
occasional uses as a fair ground.

In the early eighties reports of the coming dissection
of the Park into building lots forced the Yale Athletic
managers to consider purchase of new grounds and
the present Yale Field was the outcome, purchased in
1882 for $22,000 and with $31,000 expended for
immediate improvements, including grading. Since
then there has probably been spent upon it $150,000
more, the Field probably represented a total outlay
of not less than $200,000 — attesting the present
magnitudes of athletics — and more funds needed still
for grading the southwest angle. Though the life story
of the Field now spans almost thirty years, the features
of it, with their sharp punctuations of athletic episodes,
are too familiar to need review. The Field which
seemed three decades ago so big and adaptable to
future Yale generations is even now cramped and
outgrown; and the urgency expressed by ex-President
Dwight in one of his later annual reports for a minor
field nearer the Campus retains its force. But it is
apparently vetoed by the high cost of New Haven
land unless, indeed, relaxation of the terms of the
Hillhouse place contract gives room for those phases
of baseball which are minor and not intercollegiate.
They were not ideal fields. There was fertility of
hummock and unub," a billowy and marine layout on
all of them but Hamilton Park, and even a hand-roller,
much more a lawn mower, was a thing of the future.
But to objections to the lesions of the soil by visiting
teams, the phrase "as fair for one side as t'other"
covered a multitude of sins. And if the ball struck an

ENTRANCE TO HAMILTON PARK

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 197

impediment and leaped shortstop's head, the incident
was lost in the shuffle of many errors less pardonable.

Exact dates of the old rules of play and of their
changes are lost in the fogs of time. But certainly up
to the earlier seventies the first bound was "out" on
fouls; and up to the middle sixties first bound was out
on fair flies too. Fielders and, for that matter, the
catcher rarely risked a fly catch if it were possible to
evade it, and the uncertainties of the first bound, due
to vagaries of the ground, made it an exciting gamble
for player and spectator alike, especially after a hard
and long run. It gave a positive vantage to the home
team, familiar with the density of the soil, and on that
"first bound" the lively and elastic ball of the period,
filled with rubber, was eccentric and deceptive, espe-
cially to the catcher when he had to allow for the foul
backward twist. On a soft field the first bound was
low and pigmy; on a hard field it might — if a high
foul — jump the catcher's head by six feet 'mid the
derision of the spectators. Any long fly catch in the
outfield was one of the red-lettered feats of the game.

For several reasons batting was free and easy. In
the first place, the batsman faced no curved pitching.
He took aim at the straight, tossed ball and struck
with his full might. In the second place, the bats were
big, long, semi-upudding sticks" of soft pine, white-
wood or spruce, constantly breaking, but pretty sure
to find the ball. Moreover, strikes were called not by
any fixed rule but at the umpire's option, only exercised
when he thought a cowardly or too fastidious batsman
was letting too many good balls go by; and, finally,
the lively ball of the period had a "jumping" quality
and pace that constantly tempted hard hitting and
usually got it. Old players of today not seldom raise

198 YALE YESTERDAYS

the question how much farther, if any, the lively ball
of those archaic days was driven as a "sky" hit than
the "dead," up-to-date ball hit by the hard-wood bat.
In the writer's opinion, there wasn't much real differ-
ence. The real difference was in the speed of the old
lively ball and the pace and distance of its roll once
it got by a fielder, which made the home run almost
commonplace. On Hamilton Park in those old days
over and over again an infield bounder got its home
run after an outfielder's miss or fumble.

The University nine was chosen on novel lines.
Stalwart hitting was a prime essential — not, by the
way, quite valueless in a Yale nine today — and fielding
was rather secondary, though a strong and accurate
thrower was appraised pretty high. The outcome was
a team of giants, gifted at smiting tremendous "sky
scrapers," but weak at other points and rudimentary in
team play and in every refinement of the game. There
was no preliminary training, if a few hours of early
spring work in the Gymnasium be counted out. On no
New Haven field was there a stand to seat spectators,
and the first use of a rope to keep them back at a "big"
game was deemed a vexing and dangerous novelty.

Position play was unique and would rouse the mirth
of the baseballist of today. Long trousers were part
of the conventional college uniform and not until the
late sixties did knickerbockers come in. The catcher,
maskless, padless and gloveless, stood several feet
behind the batsman when a runner was on first base
and if he caught him on throw to second base, the
runner was hooted as a sluggard. Not until the early
seventies did Catcher Bentley — Yale '73 — seek mild
protection from the dental chair by a big square of
rubber held in the teeth — a device copied from the

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 199

Harvard catcher of that date. For a left-handed bats-
man, the shortstop crossed over to a point between
first and second bases and the third baseman took short-
stop's place or one very near it. The pitcher was but
forty-five feet in front of the batsman, yet for some
occult reason didn't insure his life. In general field
play, the three basemen hugged their bags much closer
than now. Outfielders stood considerably farther
beyond the diamond, recognizing the values of an out
on first bound. It was in a game between the Harvard
nine and a Massachusetts club that a hard-hit ball,
striking within the diamond, was caught on the deadly
first bound by a left fielder — but Boston Common,
where the game was played, was hard as the Puritan
conscience and the ball may have struck a unub" of the
rigid soil. Team play was, of course, in its rudiments.
There was a gentle hint of "backing up" and very
rarely a double play at the expense of a careless runner
waked the enthusiasm of the standing, sitting and
squatting crowd in days before bleachers were dreamed
of. But team play ended there and waited several
years for even moderate development by the famous
professional "Red Stockings" of Cincinnati.

A red-lettered game of Yale was that played June 6,
1868, at Hamilton Park, with the Union Club of
Morrisania, then champions of the country. Ten
innings were needed to give the champions victory, by
a score of 16 to 14, and the game would have been
tied again but for an error of the umpire in mis-
judging a ball as "dead." Of the return game at
Morrisania, the score is at hand, clipped from a New
York sporting paper, and is reprinted in full as an
example of the best type of scoring of the period — the
upright columns indicating in their order, left on bases,

200 YALE YESTERDAYS

fly catches, outs and runs, and the foul bound catch
being out as was the first bound of a fair ball at a
slightly earlier time:

YALE L. F. o. R. UNION L. F. o. R.

Buck, 1st b.,

0

1

3

2

Goldie, 1st b.,

1

0

3

2

Lewis, r.f.,

0

2

4

1

Austin, c.f.,

0

1

3

3

Condit, l.f.,

2

1

1

2

Ayres, s.s.,

0

1

4

2

Cleveland, 3d

b.,

0

1

4

0

Pabor, P.,

0

0

3

2

Hooker, P.,

1

0

3

0

Wright, 2d b.,

1

2

1

3

McCutchen, s.s.,

1

0

4

0

Birdsall, C.,

0

7

4

1

McClintock, r

.f.,

0

4

2

2

Shelley, 3d b.

0

0

4

1

Deming, C.,

0

1

2

2

Reynolds, r.f.,

0

0

1

4

Selden, 2d b.,

0

2

4

0

Smith, l.f.,

0

2

4

1

Totals, 4 11 27 9 Totals, 2 13 27 19

INNINGS, 123456789

Yale, 221011110—9

Union, 21222025 3—19

Umpire. — Mr. Grum of the Eckford Club.
Scorers. — Messrs. Wood and Lush.
Time of Game. — Two hours, twenty-five minutes.
Flycatches.— Yale, 11; Union, 13.
Foul Boundcatches. — Yale, 3; Union, 2.
Catches on Strikes. — Yale, 1; Union, 1.
Outs on Fouls. — Yale, 9 times; Union, 5 times.
Outs on Bases. — Yale, 11 times; Union, 12 times.
Times First-base on Hits. — Yale, 10 times; Union, 20 times.
Times First-base on Errors. — Yale, 5 times; Union, 3 times.
Total Bases on Balls. — Yale, 0 times ; Union, 1 time.
Total Bases on Hits. — Yale, 13; Union, 22.
Total Errors of Play.— Yale, 15; Union, 20.
Left after Clean Hits. — Condit, 1 ; Hooker, 1 ; McCutchen,
1.

Fancy, in our days of scientific baseball, the scoring
in print of strikes caught and the professional cham-
pions of the country making twenty errors in a game !

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 201

Yet, that game at Morrisania — now in Greater New
York — in June of 1868, was not classed as a loose one.

The game was autumnal as well as a warm weather
sport and some of the most exciting matches were
played in October. A return match with the Water-
burys bears date of November 2, 1867, when there was
ice on the pools and years before the glove came in to
warm and cushion the epidermis. Hospitality was one
of the keynotes of the sport and the nine was reckoned
barbaric that didn't entertain the visiting team at a
post-game dinner. Interchange of courtesies took also
the form of mutual gifts of silken badges with the
imprint of the club name. Veteran players bunched
or spread the badges on their chests with effects
varigated, spectacular and, aesthetically, humorous.

Town as well as gown had its baseball teams. There
were the Quinnipiacs, made up mainly from New
Haven young men of trade; and, more noteworthy,
the Mutuals, organized with six nines, chiefly from the
schoolboys of the town, whose first nine, with its oldest
player counting but seventeen years, beat most of the
Yale class teams. Three of the Mutuals, as Freshmen,
in one year "made" the University nine.

There were episodes and incidents without number.
It was at Andover School, then, as now, a big Yale
feeder, that the graduating school class of '67 —
headed for Yale '71 — had in it three fine ball players,
one of them "Archie" Bush, sure catch, hard hitter,
swift runner and well-nigh unerring in judgment,
perhaps the best player of his time, amateur or pro-
fessional. Just at the close of its last school year the
class went on a diluted spree to a nearby city. "Uncle
Sam" Taylor, headmaster of the school, a Spartan in
discipline as he was in Greek irregular verbs, expelled

202 YALE YESTERDAYS

the whole class and called on the Yale authorities to
sustain his edict. The Yale Faculty did so, but Har-
vard, more sensible and liberal, took the class in; and
Yale, as a sequel, lost the baseball championship to
Harvard for four years. It was Bush's tremendous
hit in the game of 1871 over left fielder's head that
won the game in the last inning and when a sad Yale
proverb "out of the woods but not of the Bush" had
its final application. Bush, on graduating from Har-
vard, insisted successfully against Yale's protest that
the Varsity nine, before limited to the Academic
Department, should be open to the scientific and pro-
fessional schools — there were one or two strong
players of Bush's great nine who were to pass to Har-
vard's schools. It gave Harvard victory next year,
but the year after — 1874 — a fine Yale catcher came
back to New Haven in the Law School and in two
games broke Harvard's long roll of baseball victory.

The New York firm of Peck & Snyder was the fore-
runner of the Spalding of today as a baseball empo-
rium. About the year 1868 they sent up to the nine
a curio in bats for a try out. It was a novelty as a hard
wood — ash — stick; and for several inches, beginning
two or three inches from its bigger end, it was cut
lengthwise by a saw into quadrants. Its theory was
an elastic hit and it had the humorous quality of a
weird staccato when it took the ball. But nobody on
the nine before or since could make the bat work except
one day, when in a game with the champion profes-
sionals at the Union Grounds, Brooklyn, "Tom"
Hooker, Yale pitcher, took the odd bat, caught the
ball just right and hit to far right field a ball which
for distance was said to be the record hit of those
grounds.

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 203

Other incidents, dramatic or humorous, cross mem-
ory. There was the great hit to left field of Pearce
Barnes, '74, which took the game in the last inning
from the professional Eckfords. There was the tragic
fate of French, crack first baseman, drowned at Lake
Whitney in his Sophomore year when rescuing his
sister. Another time was when our nine was to meet
the baseball champions of the country at the old Union
Grounds in Brooklyn, now lost below the dense and
expanded city. Even the name of the then champion
professionals is gone. It might have been the
"Mutuals," with its famed Start on first base, and
Hatfield the record thrower, or the old "Atlantics,"
with Pearce and O'Brien, or the Unions of Morri-
sania, with left-handed pitcher Pabor and George
Wright, later a baseball Colossus. But the ground
itself is engraved in memory with its single upper row
of bleachers, its variegated pagoda just below the deep
right field and its high board fence thickly flecked with
knot-holes, from one of which, of blessed memory,
hangs a tale.

The writer played left field; his normal position fixed
him within a few rods of the battery of knot-holes, and
he did not have to wait long to become aware of an
audience beyond the barrier, facetious, whimsical and
at times a bit vituperative. The street boy was there
in full battalion, his sharp, if somewhat coarse, wit
focussing on the fielder and each particular knot-hole
vocal as well as visual. Any small peculiarity of dress,
pose or play was the target of the running fire of jest
from the knot-hole brigade, varied by broader gener-
alities of speech levelled mainly at the coming fate of
the little New Haven greenhorns who dared face the
big champions of the land.

204 YALE YESTERDAYS

Presently a huge batsman — name not now recalled —
stepped up to the home plate. I noticed his glance in
my quarter of the field, the mighty thews of his bared
arms, his free swing. The hard hitter was divined
and I dropped back a rod or two and to lower left
field. Then came from the nearest knot-hole a voice
harsh but with a sub-note of sympathy:

"Hey, you young feller there. Look out fer that
chap at the bat. He's the slogger of the gang. He
bats close ter the foul line. Yer way off. Git up nearer
that foul line and git ther quick and yer'l ketch him."

(Scornful silence and no change of place by the left
fielder.) Again the voice :

"Saay, young feller agen. It's the truth we's a givin
yer. We's the boys that's seen them fellers play and
we knows 'em. Git way up to that foul line close by
us and ketch that big hitter." (Chorus from the knot-
holes, "Mind what he's a tellin yer. Git up to the foul
line." With et ceteras of personal criticism.)

The knot-hole suasion, if lacking culture, began to
have the dignity of multitude and experience. Half-
consciously I began to drift toward the deep foul line
and — what was more to the point — to poise for a quick
run toward the line.

"Git up farther, young feller. Yer aint right yet to
ketch him."

Then the big batsman hit. He caught the ball, in
the new baseball vernacular, "right on the nose." It
was a hot liner, at the apex of its curve not fifteen feet
from the turf, speeding like a bullet some two feet
inside the foul line and, under ordinary conditions and
with the left fielder in his orthodox place, good for
three bases if not a homer. But the knot-hole advice
had prevailed. A quick dash with just time to slacken

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 205

speed and the liner was taken at the psychological
moment, and at the physical vantage point to resist its
force — just in front of the chest.

There were thunders of applause from the knot-
holes. Fists pounded the boards, feet kicked a salvo
and the chorus of "I told yer sos" made the welkin
echo. At least so it seemed to the elate left fielder.

But there was later if not loftier triumph. An inning
or two afterward the big hitter came to the bat again.
This time the left fielder, after another charivari of
knot-hole warnings, was close to the foul line. The
big hitter sensed the situation and quartered around
for a deep field hit. Whether it was accident, the
persistence of habit, or some obscure trick of our
pitcher, who can say? What happened was another
bullet hit, but this time twenty feet or more foul. And
the fielder, thanks again to knot-hole coaching and
amid another chorus of delight from the fence, caught
out the "slogger" again.

If this were fiction instead of history, the two
catches should have saved the day and game. The
final catch should have happed in the last inning, with
the bases filled, two out and Yale just one run ahead.
But the truth is mighty and shall prevail. The two
"knot-hole" catches came early in the game. The big
batsman wasn't caught again by the left fielder. It
isn't recalled that the two catches had really much effect
on the score. At any rate the professionals beat us
badly. But that episodical baseball through a knot-
hole forty years ago survives as a reminiscence more
vivid than would have been victory.

In the way of comic incidents might be recalled the
ball caught on the fly by third baseman after a sidewise
carom from the pitcher's head, and the ball, which in

206 YALE YESTERDAYS

the Congress Avenue match of 1866, with the Charter
Oaks of Hartford, fell into the full barrel of a soft
soap vender watching the game from his wagon.

The Charter Oak Club, for years champions of
Connecticut, fearing Yale and fearing no other state
club beside, must not be dismissed without its para-
graphic tribute. On its list were carried names hardly
second, in state fame at least, to those of the baseball
colossi of the Atlantics and Eckfords. There was
"Gersh" Hubbell, afterwards billiard champion of the
state; the two Bunce brothers, twins, lithe and trusty
young players; Blackwell, a Trinity student, who won
fame in pick-up catches — then called "trapping" the
ball — a trick used by him as a mere ornament and
baseball "frill," and with a crudity which would make
the modern first baseman or catcher smile, yet not so
easy then, long before the era of portly glove and pad;
and finally "Ed." Jewell, a dashing but too spectacular
first baseman, playing more to the gallery than to the
score card. Seen now through the baseball mists the
old Charter Oaks earned their renown fairly by good
discipline, steady work and the germs of team play
when that baseball trait was almost unknown. The
famed club met one of its first defeats, oddly enough,
by the Freshman nine of the Class of 1870, the evening
of whose unlooked-for victory at Hartford was lurid
in the annals of the old Campus.

It was in one of those games with the Charter Oaks,
that a singular "out" was scored. The ball was hit
hard in a hot liner to shortstop. It struck the short-
stop's ankle, ran up his body to the chest and there, by
instinct more than design, was caught and held amid
cheers which made the welkin echo. And there were
some heroic baseball figures even in that infancy of

REMINISCENCES OF YALE BASEBALL 207

the game. One remembers Sheldon, '67, a wondrous
thrower for distance; McCutchen, '70, a boy in stature,
but whose sharp play of grounders at shortstop nick-
named him "the rat-trap"; and "Charley" Edwards,
'66, skilled fielder and swift runner, whose mysterious
and tragic passing at New Haven is of recent history.
Scholarship was linked in those archaic days closer
with athletics than now — and a 2.25 rule would have
been equally needless and scorned. The records of the
University nine of 1868 show that two of its regulars
graduated with high orations, two with orations and
three with first disputes. And there were other dif-
ferentials— less of science but more of wholesome fun;
less of nervous competition for the nine but more of
recreation; less of training but more of individual
initiative and action; less of the professional method
and spirit and more of the amateur feeling; and other
traits of the old game to which the veteran looks back
with conviction that the baseball scions of today have
somewhat yet to learn from the college sport of their
fathers.

IV
YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES

Yale football in what may be called its archaic
epoch, with its great class matches on New Haven
Green, of Sophomores and Freshmen — contests that
were lineal ancestors of the later and up-to-date rush —
probably goes back to about the year 1840. But of its
first decade few or no records have come down. The
obscurities of time probably veil several mighty strug-
gles in front of the old State House, dramatic incident
of rough scrimmage and rush, and plenty of heroic
deeds of individual prowess of brain and muscle in the
game. Not until the early fifties do the football lights
begin to shine brightly and then only at a period which
proved to be at once the zenith and the final eclipse of
the ancient game. Old-fashioned class football sang
its swan song in 1856 by decree of the Faculty, just
after it seemed institutional and vitalized. Seen from
the landscape viewpoint of half a century, the prohibi-
tion of the Faculty is to be criticised justly. In abolish-
ing the annual class game, the Yale authorities did
away with one of the salient things which lent outline,
depth and picturesqueness to the academic life; which,
in physical harmfulness, was to the football of today
as a game of checkers; and which served as a benign
escape valve to the pent-up steam of the two hostile
lower classes. If there had been more football in the
fifties, there would probably have been less hazing in
the sixties.

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 209

An ancient, faded six-by-four-inch broadside headed
by the familiar Yale Lit. figure of Governor Yale, of
unknown date but almost certainly printed during the
thirteen years following 1840, rescues for us the rules
of the old game on the Green. They read as follows :

1 i ) The players are to be divided into two divisions
as nearly equal as possible.

(2) The weakest side (or, if it be between classes,
the lowest class) has the first warning.

(3 ) The bounds are the path running in front of the
State House to the Center Church; and the fence upon
Chapel Street, between Temple and College Streets.

(4) The brick walk on Temple Street and the fence
upon College Street are two side bounds. If anyone
picks up the ball over these side bounds or, picking it
up anywhere in the field, can run with it over these
bounds, he has a right to a kick at the place where it
went over.

(5) If the ball is caught it must be kicked from the
place ; the catcher has no right to run with it.

(6 ) If the ball is upon the ground, it must be kicked
upon the ground; no one can pick it up and bound it;
but he can run with it to either side bound as specified
in article 4.

(7) In the test game between the Sophomores and
Freshmen, the Freshmen have the first warning.
According to custom, it (the game) consists of five
trials, the side that gets three games being the winner.

(8) In the last two trials, the Seniors assist the
Sophomores and the Juniors the Freshmen.

The rules are signed "By a Graduate."
The ball used in those days appears to have been
generally of thick rubber and about ten inches in
diameter; but sometimes of a beef bladder blown up

210 YALE YESTERDAYS

and laced up in a leather case. The latter principle
has been modernized in the football ovoid of the
present day.

From the New Haven correspondence of the New
York Times of October 15, 1852, is extracted this
description of the game of that year:

The freshman gave the first kick and then a general rush
was made for the ball around which they formed a dense
crowd for fifteen minutes, each class striving with their utmost
ability without gaining a single rod. At this crisis the ball
was kicked from the crowd over the side-bounds, where any-
one who can get it has the right to one kick. A sophomore
obtained this right but, not being expert himself, he communi-
cated the ball to the leader of his class, a powerful fellow, who
ran several rods with it when he was overtaken by a more
athletic freshman, but succeeded in throwing the ball nearly
over the goal. One or two more kicks and the umpire decided
that the sophomores had won the first game. After contesting
the second game for nearly an hour the umpires finally decided
that one of the freshman having caught the ball was entitled to
a kick at it. This the sophomores were unwilling to allow, but
claimed a victory and challenged the freshmen to commence
a third game. The freshmen determined to abide by the
decision of the umpires and refused to commence the third game

until the second (as they claimed) ended Darkness

ended the fierce conflict. Hundreds of spectators witnessed this
trial of strength in which the combatants evinced as much
interest and invincible courage as was exercised on the plains
of Mexico by the American soldiers; and it is also worthy of
note that in the contest also one brave hero fainted and was
borne bleeding from the field.

On Saturday, October 22, 1853, beginning nominally
at 2 o'clock p.m. but, owing to a prolonged wrangle in
selecting the three umpires, not actually until a half-
hour later, came the climacteric football bout between
the Freshman Class of 1857 and the Sophomore Class

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 211

of 1856. The Freshman leaders, pervaded with the
classic stories of the deeds of battle of the Greek
phalanxes, devised at a secret meeting a formation
which, in a sense, antedated the later fame of
Harvard's "flying wedge." This plan was to select
thirty-six of the largest and strongest men of the class,
who were to form a square, the ball to be placed a
certain distance in front. The ball was to be kicked
a few feet, as the rules of the game required, then it
was to be picked up and brought back into the square,
which, with locked arms, was to advance towards the
State House, backed and flanked by the rest of the
class. When it met the opposing Sophomores it took
the form of a diamond. Two strong men of the class
were to form the frontal apex of the angle. Behind
them came three ranks of three, four and five men,
each picked on the principle of blended muscle and
weight. The rest of the class was organized as flank
and rear guards to protect the wedge. Somehow the
Sophomores got wind of the new device and picked a
body of fourteen natural athletes to break up the
Freshman phalanx by side attack — strategy which, as
the sequel shows, proved its merits. The Freshmen
on the fateful afternoon, put 131 men into the field
and the man was evidently "queered" for his college
course who didn't show up on the Green. The
Sophomores had but eighty-nine men, but with their
added year of age, heavier and more brawny than the
Freshmen. Many of the combatants had stripped to
their undershirts. Others wore fantastic clothes and
false mustaches, and red paint and lampblack in streaks
and blotches made their faces hideous. The match
had been heralded far and undergraduates, the Faculty
and half New Haven formed a deep fringe around

212 YALE YESTERDAYS

the battlefield, with a high-colored background of
women in the windows and balconies of Chapel Street.
The game opened with a "fake" cant of the ball by
the Freshman kicker-off, who, instead of footing the
ball took it back into the wedge, which then began its
solid march toward the north goal line; but only for
a moment and until hit by the flank attack of the
Sophomore fourteen. The flank impact was sharp and
successful. It scattered the flank guard "interference,"
tangled up the wedge, and the game presently resolved
itself into the old-fashioned dense mob play around the
ball. After a long struggle, a Sophomore, carrying the
ball, came out of the human pack, ran across the
Trinity Church side line and won his free kick, which
didn't, however, send the ball quite to the Freshman
goal line. Here another long fight followed, when a
Freshman got the ball at the edge of the big scrim-
mage and with a clear field before him, ran the ball to
the Sophomore goal line. The Freshmen sung their
paeans of victory, but the Sophomores claimed that the
ball struck the South fence and refused to play on unless
the claim was allowed. The match then became
forensic. There ensued a long and tumultuous
wrangle and it is at this point that the quaint contem-
poraneous narrative avers: "Some difficulties at this
time took place between a few individuals of both
classes. Angry words and appeals somewhat more
impressive passed between them." Verbal football
promised to continue until darkness, the three umpires
couldn't agree and two of the three resigned after
declaring the match a draw. It was during its argu-
mentative period that the Freshmen received a big
bouquet alleged to have been sent from the ladies at

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 213

the New Haven House. Freshman John M. Holmes,
not unknown later as preacher and verse maker,
acknowledged it in this gem of brevity:

Ladies: — In the name of the class of '57 I thank you for
this honor. In my present plight I will only add this sentiment :
Ever may the flowers of love and hope and happiness yield you
their blushes and their fragrance.

But the Sophomores declared that the bunch of
flowers was a professional "stage bouquet," bought
either by previous subscription of the Freshmen them-
selves or by Junior class admirers. History will hardly
clear up the floral problem.

With the resignation of the tired umpires, the great
match ended physically, only to burst out anew in a
tempest of class broadsides, lampoons, verses and other
screeds, the Freshmen even printing the first number
of a newspaper dubbed "The Arbiter" to sustain their
title as victors.

The red-hot football antagonisms of the fifties were
prolific in prose and verse. Here is some of the chal-
lenge literature signed by class committees :

"The Class of '56 hereby defy the sophomores to
the four remaining games of football at such time as
they may appoint."

Fifty-Five's acceptance of a previous challenge has
an addendum which has its modern suggestion for the
late ill-starred Princeton game.

What maddened folly that could dare
Rush headlong on the tiger's lair.

— Keats.

These two more familiar acceptances will also bear
reprint :

214 YALE YESTERDAYS

Come!

And like sacrifices in their prime
To the fire-eyed maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer you.
Let them come on, the base-born-crew,
Each soil-stained churl, alack!
What gain they but a splitten skull,
A sod for their base back.

In the endless songs of victory or defiance which
followed the combats of the early fifties, the under-
graduate muse tried vainly to soar high with draggled
wings. Samples are annexed:

Ye bold and merry sons of Yale !

Come listen while I tell
A long to be remembered tale

Of scenes which once befell,
When full two hundred fearless men

The Green were scattered o'er
And Glory greeted there and then

The class of Fifty-Four.

CHORUS

Come join the chorus,

Shout, Shout, each sophomore!
Three cheers for Yale and three times three

For dauntless Fifty-Four.

We waited long to see the ball,

And sweep it o'er the field,
Ere Fifty-Five, disheartened all,

The privilege would yield.
At length it came ; we formed our rank,

And with one ringing cheer
Drove ball and Freshman, rear and flank

And swept the greensward clear.

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 215

Yet once again repeat it while

Their requiem we sing.
We charge upon them rank and file

And beat them with our Wing.
Three times and out ; we've won the day,

The bloodless strife is o'er.
We bear the victor's prize away

And shout for Fifty-Four.

In jubilee tonight we meet,

A merry sophomore band,
Each classmate with a smile to greet

And clasp each proffered hand.
Then give three cheers for Fifty-Five

In all its fierce array,
Three more for Juniors who survive

And nine for that bouquet.

The "Wing" referred to in the verse will be recog-
nized by grey-haired graduates as Wing Yung, Yale's
famous Chinese graduate of '54.

The callow muse of '56 "blew out" in such ecstatic
stanzas as this:

The gallant class of Fifty-Five

By lamp black made more brave,
To prove their courage still alive

A valiant answer gave.
With grim moustache and asses' ears,

They thought the Fresh to fright,
But lusty men, with rousing cheers,

Not lamp black, win the fight.

CHORUS

Hi! Sophomores! Ho! Sophomores!

Aint you in a fix?
Beat once by class of Fifty-Four

And now by Fifty-Six.

2 1 6 YALE YESTERDAYS

The next and final effusion, while hardly of a classi-
cal standard, serves to illustrate the versified football
polemics of the period and throws an incidental side-
light on the "bouquet trick." It is entitled, "A Revised
Edition of The Battle of the Ball" — the last five words
having headed a Freshman's prolix song of victory.

And so the freshmen all proceed

(As it had been before agreed)

And get a grand bouquet.

For Fifty-five, as Juniors tell,

Had done the same when beaten well,

And so, "why shouldn't they."

And then, to hide the deep disgrace,
That very justly claims its place
On a dishonored brow,

They hasten to their rhyming man

And tell him quickly, if he can

To write a poem now.

And so he to their succor runs
With many jokes and many puns.
("Sucker" in truth was he,)

And writes their greatly wished for song.

(Three weary, boastful columns long)

And prints it greedily.

The Class of 1860 had arranged a match with the
Class of 1 86 1, when, in accord with a Faculty vote,
President Woolsey "blocked the kick" with the terse
announcement at Chapel: "The football match next
Saturday will not be played." And for more than ten
years after, at Yale, there was a football hiatus.

The Class of 1872, very strong and ardent in ath-
letics, deserves its historical credit mark for the revival
of the game. It came about thus : In those days, base-
ball was played in the autumn up to about the first of

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 217

November, when cold weather chilled the sport.
November, therefore, was left as a month without
snow when there was a sporting hiatus which certain
restless spirits of seventy-two, in the Junior year of the
class, determined to fill. A rough code of rules was
adopted, while a half-dozen footballs and a long vacant
lot a little to the northwest of York Square did the
business. Forty or fifty of the class took up the game.
The Class of Seventy-three followed suit and a match
between the two classes was arranged. This little
condensed item from the "Yalensicula" of the Yale
Courant of November 16, 1870, records the first Yale
match, which opened a new football age :

The football game (at Hamilton Park) between the Juniors
and the Sophomores last Wednesday was very interesting,
though the one-sided nature of the contest detracted somewhat
from the excitement. The Juniors selected were a much
heavier set of men and succeeded in driving the ball past the
Sophomore goal six times in succession. The Sophomores,
however, played a plucky game and came near winning two
of the games.

Seventy-three, however, began faithful practice, got
their "second wind," challenged the too careless victors
of seventy-two to a second game some two weeks later
and won by four goals to two. Then football went
over to the following autumn, when the rivals played
the final game for the championship of the College.
By this time the sport had reached a pitch which the
Yale Courant of the period describes as a "frenzy"-
and a large crowd witnessed the climacteric struggle
which ended in a "draw," neither side winning the
requisite four games out of seven. Seventy-two took
the first game after an hour's contest, and darkness

218 YALE YESTERDAYS

closed the second, after play of an hour and forty
minutes more.

With the autumn of 1872, the revived football under
the paternity of D. S. Schaff, of 1873, becomes inter-
collegiate. Columbia is challenged and beaten. Foot-
ball is, at last, firm on its legs and there follows the
four years of the "old-fashioned" game of the "Ameri-
can" type, which are to end in 1876 with the adoption
of the Rugby game, fathered by Harvard. During
the four years Yale usually comes out victorious over
Columbia and Rutgers, which have taken up the game,
but is fairly outclassed by Princeton, whose primacy in
the sport is marked. Princeton plays a game of the
"rush" order, with the ball near the center, while Yale
plays overmuch and too loosely around the ends — thus
forced to bring in the ball sidewise to the goal, while
Princeton forces the ball straight to the posts; and,
besides, the men from New Jersey excel in agility and
in "batting" the ball. One funny intercollegiate
episode crosses the period. Harvard, just beginning
the Rugby game, is invited by Yale to send delegates
to a football convention of colleges and her captain,
in declining, impugns the Yale game as having "too
much brute force, weight and, especially, shin element,"
while "our (Harvard's) game depends upon running,
dodging and position playing, i. e., kicking across field
into one another's hands." Even allowing for the later
development of the mass play and scrimmage, the
unconscious irony of the Harvard captain is as rich
as it is obvious.

Class games began in 1870 with thirty men on a
side, later dropping to twenty-five, a number lowered
afterwards to twenty in the intercollegiate matches.
Tripping and holding were ruled out, nor could the ball

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 219

be carried; but, as substitute tricks, batting the ball
with the flat of the fist was valid as was also running
the ball across the field by short bounds. As now
remembered, a fly catch gave the player a free kick;
but an attempt to run in as a side trick the "toe catch,"
or passing the ball to the hand on the toe, acquired only
with long practice, and a device coming from some of
the "prep" schools, was ruled out as opposed to the
spirit of the rule, while squaring with its letter. When
the ball went out of bounds a player either threw it
in with back turned to the field or brought it into the
field and tossed it in the air. The modern "off-side"
play was satirized by two so-called "pea nutters" or
"lurkers," quick, agile players who went down on to
the opponent's goal and stayed there to drive the ball
through. Two "backs" watched the "lurkers" and
sixteen out of the twenty men on a side thus, in effect,
became rushers, who could play wherever the captain
sent them. The positions of honor were three or four
"free" places just outside of the ruck of the game. In
these near skirmish lines, the best players danced, ready
to take the ball and advance it as soon as it came out
of the ruck. Goals were further apart than now —
usually about 600 feet — and there was no cross-piece.
To win a single game — as distinguished from a
match — or, indeed, to score any point at all, the ball
had to be driven between the posts; and to win a match
usually four goals out of seven had to be scored. A
single game lasting an hour was not uncommon and a
match sometimes three or four times as long.

"Babying," also dubbed "puggling" the ball or
carrying it along by short kicks, was one of the high
arts of the sport not attained by many, and with
obstacles much increased by the large number of play-

220 YALE YESTERDAYS

ers and the vagaries of the ball — of rubber blown up
and "locked" by a tube. The ball was to the last
degree resilient and with the quality of appearing in
half a dozen places in as many seconds. That persist-
ent bounce of the ball was no small factor in the open
and lively character of the old game.

As the first international episode in football, the
Yale-Eton match played December 6, 1873, deserves
its brief tale. A number of young Englishmen, grad-
uates of Eton, in business or traveling in this country,
after seeing one of the intercollegiate matches at
Hamilton Park, proposed a game between Yale and
old Etonians in the United States. The idea was wel-
comed at Yale, and after considerable discussion, the
Yale rules were accepted with "peanutting" left out,
teams of eleven and the match to be won or lost on
actual results of games. The Englishmen came up
from New York with a number of ladies, the players
having been gathered from all over the country, one
coming from San Francisco and another from St.
Louis. They were stalwart, ruddy young Englishmen
averaging twenty-four years of age, who, in the Eton
uniform of white flannel crossed by light blue shoulder
sashes, made a fine appearance on the field, emphasized
by contrast with Yale, whose team wore no uniform
except light blue caps. Among the English team, was
a live Viscount (Talbot) and Lord Rosebery would
have played but for accidental detention.

The Englishmen, though out of practice and easily
winded, played wonderfully well. They adopted, in
a general way, the Princeton "rush" tactics of keeping
the ball before the team on the central line of the field,
and in skillful "babying" they showed Yale some new
and telling points. Yale, on the other hand, played

YALE FOOTBALL OF THE FIFTIES 221

a side game — which, in these days would be called
working the ends — a policy well favored by a ball
more lively than the visitors had been used to. But
Yale was still more favored by winning the toss and
taking the wind, which blew a half-gale down the field.
It took Yale, with the wind, an hour to score the first
goal; then the Etonians took the wind and the next
goal in fifteen minutes. Yale then scored a goal in
twenty-five minutes and also took the match as the
visitors had to leave to catch a train. Had the day
been calm or had the Englishmen won the toss, they
would, undoubtedly, have taken the match too.

In all games the rubber ball of the period, with its
chronic infirmity of leaking or splitting, was a source
of vexation blended with amusement. It reached a
climax in a match with Princeton at the Park, where
the ball split in the middle of a hot game. By some
inadvertence no substitute ball had been supplied and
players and spectators had to wait until the creeping
horse car of the time brought out a fresh ball from
the Campus. In that particular match with Prince-
ton— in the autumn of 1873 — those Yale players who
survive will long remember sadly the prowess of a big
Princeton theologue. He seemed to cover the whole
field at once and with his fist could bat football liners
that rivalled those of the baseball diamond.

In those times the Campus was an arena of constant
football controversy between students and Faculty,
especially on moonlight nights, when the face of the
old Lyceum clock served as the favorite football
target.

The old-time football was not scientific and com-
pares with the system and subtleties of the modern
superfine game as two-old-cat with latter day baseball.

222 YALE YESTERDAYS

But it was an "open" sport; what science it had was
not masked by mass plays; and its all-round quality,
its breeziness, its bounce and hearty fun had in them
something of suggestion, at least, for the hosts of the
modern gridiron.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE TREASURY

I

YALE'S TREASURY

The list of Yale's treasurers begins with Nathaniel
Lynde of Saybrook, Conn., who, in 1701, gave the
College its first house. Mr. Lynde, though regularly
elected treasurer, appears never to have performed
the duties of the office, maybe because there were no
duties to perform. In the same year was elected
Richard Rosewell of New Haven, who lived after-
wards but a few months. John Ailing of New Haven
was chosen in 1702. Ten years later (1712) he was
succeeded by John Prout, successful merchant of New
Haven, who held the place for forty-eight years. His
accounts were kept in ounces of silver and records
show that for the two years ending in July, 1761, the
total income of the College was 2,093 ounces — or
about 1,046 ounces a year, representing in our time
about the same number of dollars bullion value but,
in those far-away days, several times their purchasing
power.

In 1765 came in Roger Sherman, later member of
the committee which drafted the Declaration of
Independence, and United States Senator. For six
years following him served John Trumbull, author
of the political satire "McFingal" and a judge of
Connecticut Supreme Court. Next came, in 1782,
James Hillhouse, who held the treasurership until his
death fifty years after. His salary as treasurer was

226 YALE YESTERDAYS

ten pounds a year, while even a poor tutor got seventy
pounds — a stipend indexing alike Mr. Hillhouse's
academic loyalty and the small duties of the office.
Twenty years after taking office, Treasurer Hill-
house's salary was raised to $60 a year. Among the
later treasurers Wyllis Warner was the soliciting agent
of the centum millia fund, to be referred to hereafter;
and Edward C. Herrick, entomologist and skilled
amateur astronomer, has an abiding memorial in the
uYale Oak" of today, which was christened the
"Herrick Oak" when first planted some four decades
ago, in the corner of the Old College yard and covered
by Battell Chapel.

It is a singular fact that the systematic accounts of
the College preserved run back only to the year 1796,
uncertain tradition affirming that, before that date,
they were not kept in books at all, but on separate and
scattered sheets now lost. One finds, however, in the
old volumes, mellowed and dingy with time, some
interesting entries. Payments for glass figure exten-
sively, indicating that the undergraduate of the
eighteenth century had his window pane objective—
as the penal College Statutes prove, too. An entry in
the year 1800 shows that President Dwight was paid
$450 for a year's preaching, or the equal of almost
half of his salary of $983 paid that year, though the
year following he appears to have drawn $1,335. In
the former year the auditing committee, including
Treasurer Hillhouse himself, would not accept but
referred to the Corporation for further action an
excess of $101.95 charged over and above the appro-
priation for a monument to President Stiles — by no
means the first time that contract prices have been
exceeded, though the deficit does not always follow men

JAMES HILLHOUSE, YALE 1773

TREASURER 1782-1832
From a portrait in Woodbridge Hall

YALE'S TREASURY 227

to their graves. Tutors in those days were getting
$211 to $236 a year. The treasury accounts ran into
mills where an odd number of cents had to be split.
Not in the treasury accountings proper, but in an older
"Land book" which the treasury holds, is a schedule
which gives the sum total of the scientific apparatus of
the College in 1747. It is annexed verbatim:

A telescope with a tripod; two setts of posts and a glass to
be screwed on to look on the sun.

A pair of globes celestial and terrestrial with quadrants of
altitudes.

A pair of old globes.

A theodolite with a tripod, plain table and brass scale and
sights for it, needles and glasses.

Two measuring wheels or perambulators.

A Gunter's chain, a short wooden scales, a pair of dividers,
a protractor.

A loadstone set in brass with steel arms.

A microscope with the apparatus.

A barometer with thermometer.

An Orrery, a concave glass, a curve glass, a multiplying glass.

A pair of small neat ballances or scales with all proper
weights.

A landscape box, two prisms with a stand, a brass syringe.

About ten glass tubes.

The same volume shows that for ten years, 1743-
1753, the total accessions to the Yale Library were
thirty-one books, most of them of sermons.

The first printed report of the treasurer appears
upon one side and part of a single little yellow sheet,
faded with the years and bearing date of August i,
1830. Here it is in full:

228 YALE YESTERDAYS

PRODUCTIVE FUNDS OF THE ACADEMICAL DEPARTMENT
AUG. IST 1830

Phoenix bank stock at par . . . $ 8,223.91
Good notes and debts 19,864.27

28,088.18
Notes of Graduates 2,768.08

30,856.26
Debts owed by the College .... 13,000.00

Balance 17,856.26

Interest on $17,856 . . . $1,071.36
Ground rents .... 862.30
Rents of houses in New Haven 740.00

Whole income from funds . . 2,673.66

In the expense account for the fiscal year ending
August i, 1830, incidentals figure at $1,111, wood
$375, "Commission on term bills" $484, librarian's
salary $100, appropriations for indigent students $870,
and instruction (salaries) $11,735. The total expense
for the year was $20,309. The larger items in only
nine sources of income were term bills $16,136, inter-
est $877, and rents $1,422. Total income was
$19,471 and expenses exceeded income by $837.

In the next fiscal year, the Medical School fund
appears, amounting to $4,376 in Phoenix Bank stock;
and Theological Department funds of $18,048,
represented by "Dwight professor notes, stock and
subscriptions."

The oldest fund of the College, of large size and one
of the most interesting, is the "Centum Millia" fund,
which is returned in the last Treasurer's report ( 1908-
1909) at $82,950. Aroused by the low state of the

YALE'S TREASURY 229

Yale funds in 1830 a mighty effort was made to raise
a general fund of $100,000. The circular appeal
appears with the names of the first subscribers under
date of December i, 1831. It recites that, since its
founding, Yale College has received from state grants
$75,000 and from individuals but $70,000; that owing
to fidelity and economy uThe College plant may be
estimated as worth $150,000," but that, owing to loss
by failure of the Eagle bank and outlay for plant, the
whole income, apart from term bills, "but little exceeds
$2,000 and not one professorship in the College is
endowed"; that while Harvard has a plant worth
$800,000 and income of $24,000, the annual deficit of
Yale is from $500 to $1,000, although she has a larger
number of students than any other American college.
Friends of Yale are asked to decide whether Yale
College, "after diffusing her rays so widely for more
than a century, is destined to rise with the rising great-
ness of the nation or, having attained the zenith of
her strength, shall be doomed, descending, to withdraw
her light till her place shall be found among the stars
of an inferior magnitude."

In the list of subscribers to the first $42,000 of the
fund appear a number of famous names, the poor
professors doing their share — and more — with the
rest. They include President Jeremiah Day, $1,000;
Benjamin Silliman, $1,000; James Kent, $500; Leon-
ard Bacon, $150; John Pierpont, $150; Horace
Binney, $100; Noah Porter, Jr., $100; F. A. P. Bar-
nard, $100; Horace Bushnell, $100; and Timothy
Pitkin, $150. The Yale Senior Class subscribed
$1,000.

The earliest printed document in the treasury files
at the Yale Library bears date of September, 1823.

230 YALE YESTERDAYS

In it David C. DeForest recites his descent from a
French Huguenot of his family name, who fled from
France to Holland at the revocation of the edict of
Nantes, and expresses his intention of giving the Col-
lege $5,000, to remain at interest until January i,
1852, when he computes it will amount to "Twenty-
five thousand nine hundred and forty-one dollars,
eighty cents and six mills." Then the income is to go
to DeForest descendants or a student willing to assume
the name and for the DeForest gold medal, now the
foremost literary and oratorical prize of the College.

II

EARLY GIFTS TO YALE

The gifts of Yale began with her founding in 1701
and in a sense the first gift was her founding, when in
October of that remote year, the original ten trustees —
or some of them — had their historic meeting in
Branford and gave their forty volumes of substratum
for the establishment of the College. By strict con-
struction the College thus had a literary rather than
financial tap-root. But, naturally, from the very
beginning and especially during the early decades,
when students of the College were few, financial
support from extraneous sources was a prime element
in its vitality and growth. The history of Yale gifts
and of their varied character, from the small offerings
of the early eighteenth century down to the great and
rising benefactions of the last fifty years, is a long
one — too long to fill in with much detail.

In the same month and year of the historic "gift
of books" came the first contribution of the Colonial
legislature to the embryo College. It was "120
pounds in country pay annually," country pay meaning
payment in "rates," i.e., taxes levied by the Colonial
"General Court," in the payment of which commodi-
ties were appraised 50 per cent higher than the
money price. The 120 pounds was equivalent in our
denominations to about $275, which then would be
equal to about three times the present purchasing

232 YALE YESTERDAYS

power of the sum. The Colonial State recognized its
natural fatherhood of education and the theological
motive penetrating state society and the status of the
new College was an added force. And as the state
started its aid, so it continued. The $275 was paid
regularly for fifty-four years, besides other state gifts
including one in the administration of Rector Cutler
(1719-1722), "impost on rum" of 115 pounds for the
Rector's house. Connecticut's total gifts to Yale may
be reckoned roughly at $250,000, or a round quarter-
million, since the founding, not counting the tax
exemptions shared by Yale with Trinity and Wesleyan.
The state gifts have included many grants for improve-
ments of the college plant, including the construction
of South Middle College, of the extinct Trumbull
Gallery, and the old Medical School, now the Sheff
administration building.

The Richard Salter gift in 1781 of 200 acres of
land in Tolland County, Conn., for promoting the
study of Hebrew is of interest for being the basis of
a Hebrew "elective" in his own college time — first
prophecy — or portent — of the elective system to begin
a quarter-century after. Not until 1782 did Yale
receive any important gift from one of her grad-
uates— 500 pounds then from Daniel Lathrop of the
Class of 1733, who gave it without restrictions. But
Harvard with a larger and richer constituency had not
received so large a gift from a graduate until 130 years
after her founding. Yale's gift of $10,000 in 1834
by Dr. A. E. Perkins, Yale '30, for the library, was
the largest single donation down to that time.

A few years before that date, in 1823, there ap-
peared on the roll of Yale givers a name almost
unremembered now but which should be rescued from

EARLY GIFTS TO YALE 233

obscurity and set high in her honor list. Sheldon
Clark was born on a farm, the son of a farmer,
January 31, 1785, and in the up-country town of
Oxford, Conn. He had early aspirations toward
learning, thwarted by the death of parents and
dependence on a parsimonious farming grandsire, who
insisted that his charge should hold fast to the soil.
But the youth read books and had a brief period of
education at Litchfield, Conn., higher than the little
red schoolhouse — enough to whet his craving for
knowledge, and respect for it. When young Clark
was twenty-five the grandfather died, leaving the
grandson some $20,000. He came to New Haven,
and for a few months attended Yale lectures and
recitations as a non-enrolled student. Going back to
the farm, he was for the next ten years a soil tiller,
teaching school winters and meanwhile loaning funds
until his capital grew to $25,000. To use the words
of his biographer, the elder Professor Silliman: "In
a rugged country of stony hills he had followed the
plow, he had fattened droves of cattle, he had taught
school in winter and loaned money at all times — not
to become wealthy for himself but to promote the good
of others."

In the year 1823, his benefactions to Yale began.
In that year he gave $5,000; the year after $1,200
more; and the same sum four years later. He gave
in ten separate sums the $1,200 that bought the tele-
scope in the old Athenaeum tower through which so
many college generations studied the heavens; and in
a letter of that time acknowledging the thanks of the
Senior Class for the gift, he recites his high motives
in his benefactions and the adverse criticisms he had
incurred — maybe from mercenary relatives and heirs-

234 YALE YESTERDAYS

at-law. Dying suddenly and tragically by a fall in his
barn, April 10, 1840, he left Yale most of his estate,
by a will drawn seventeen years before, deposited with
Professor Silliman and left unchanged. Altogether his
benefactions amounted to $30,000, three times the
donations of any other individual giver down to 1841 ;
and among his gifts was one for the promotion of
graduate study, attesting how far the up-country
farmer was ahead of his generation. The great gifts
of later times may obscure yet hardly measure up in
fair balance to those of Sheldon Clark. Within a few
years — 1905 — he has had an analogue in the giver
of the Viets fund, entered in the Sheff moneys at
$281,753 — coming by will unsolicited and unlooked
for from Levi C. Viets, a resident of a back town of
Hartford County.

For obvious reasons some of the old sectarian funds
show queer changes as time has swept on from an
epoch of dogma into one of duty. The Dwight Pro-
fessorship Fund of Systematic Theology in the Divinity
School is an instance to the point. It was secured by
the Corporation through subscriptions to the amount
of about $20,000 in 1822, and named in honor of the
first President Dwight, whose son was a large con-
tributor. The conditions — presumptively laid down
or, at least, accepted by the Corporation — set forth
that the professor before appointment must be exam-
ined as to his faith and, in writing, declare his "free
assent to the confession of faith and rules of Eccle-
siastical discipline agreed upon by the churches of the
State in the year 1708" or seven years after the found-
ing of the College. It is further declared that if the
person who fills the chair of the professorship holds
or teaches doctrine contrary to those of 1708, "it shall

SHELDON CLARK, EARLY BENEFACTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY

EARLY GIFTS TO YALE 235

be the duty of the Corporation to dismiss such person
from office forthwith."

The Root Scholarships in the Theological School,
founded in 1864, during the Civil War, go to young
men of decided and hearty anti-slavery character, sen-
timent and principles, and known as such to the Faculty
by examination and otherwise, and, in their judgment,
likely to exert a good and efficient influence in that
behalf." The academic Trinity Scholarship, founded
in 1855, gives to the Rector and Wardens of Trinity
Church, New Haven, the appointment of the schokr.
But, if they do not appoint, the academic Faculty can
do so. The large Porter Fund of the Academic
Department, given in 1878, provides that $600 a year
is to go for a lectureship on the topics of "Righteous-
ness and Common Sense," and, somewhat similarly, the
Silliman Lectureship Fund was given in 1884 for a
series of lectures, uthe general tendency of which may
be such as will illustrate the presence and wisdom of
God as manifested in the natural and moral World,"
but they must not be on topics relating to polemical or
dogmatic theology. These provisions let in the up-
to-date important Silliman lectures by world-known
men of science.

Another curious fund of much the same sort is the
Divinity Fund of $50,000 in the Academic Depart-
ment, the income of which is used to support preaching
in the college pulpit. It runs back to a gift in 1746 of
about $142, made by Philip Livingston of New York,
whose family name by that small donation was for
many years linked with the professorship. The
severely orthodox President Clap in 1756 added a gift
of land worth about $200, and in 1863 S. B. Chit-
tenden of Brooklyn raised the fund to $50,000.

236 YALE YESTERDAYS

President Clap when he made his donation attached
the condition that the incumbent

shall always believe, profess and teach for truth all the
doctrines contained in the Assembly's Catechism and the Con-
fession of Faith received and established in the churches of
Connecticut, and none contrary thereto and shall preach in
the College Hall or Chapel on the Lord's Day and other days

as often at least as other universities generally do

Provided .... if the Professor of Divinity should preach or
teach any doctrines contrary or repugnant to any of the doc-
trines contained in said catechism or confession of faith, then,
in either case, this grant shall cease, determinate or be void.

The sensations of President Clap, could he see in
these days even the interest on his $200 used to pay a
Unitarian like Dr. Edward Everett Hale for preaching
in the college pulpit, can be better fancied than
described; and in the roll of college preachers he
would find some other terrifying names.

Another hereditary fund is the "Day Fund," origi-
nally of $2,000, given by Thomas Day of Hartford,
in 1832. Along with provision for support and educa-
tion at Yale of Day descendants, the President of the
College is authorized to withhold the benefit of the
fund "for immoral conduct or a violation of the Col-
lege laws" from any student otherwise entitled to
receive it. But, if the student reforms, then the Presi-
dent can apply it to the student's benefit or add the
sum to the principal, as he sees fit. The gift has the
somewhat peculiar provision that the President and
Fellows must make good any loss in either the principal
or income of the fund. In some contrast the Elliot
hereditary fund allows the College "the usual percent-
age for managing trust funds." The Leavenworth
hereditary funds follow the analogy of the Day Fund

EARLY GIFTS TO YALE 237

in holding the College responsible for losses and have
the exceptional feature of providing for advertising
of the scholarships in New York, New Haven and
Hartford papers.

Memories of the older generation of Yale graduates
go back in somewhat sardonic spirit to the Old Treas-
ury building, which stood for some seventy years on
ground a little in front of the present statue of Presi-
dent Woolsey. In wildest nightmares no one could
dream of the architectural fitness of the ancient
structure to the financial ideal. It was, in fact, in-
tended and used for the Trumbull Collection of paint-
ings, which had been bought by the College for a low
annuity; and, unless tradition goes astray, as Trumbull
was to be buried beneath the building, it was framed
in a sarcophagal and tomb-like design, symbolic also
of the deadly decrees of the college Faculty issued
from its conclaves in the building and which cut off
prematurely so many an undergraduate life. For
years the treasury was a cramped room in the cellar-
like first story, but later rising to better quarters one
flight up when the Trumbull Collection — with his
remains — found permanent lodgment in the present
Art Building. The old structure, an architectural wart
on the Campus, came down when Woodbridge Hall
went up.

For years the printed reports of the treasurer,
beginning in 1830, fill less than one page of a small
sheet. As the funds grew and departments were
added to the College, all to be welded ere long into
the University, the sheet waxed into a small pamphlet.
But for more than a half-century it was hardly more
than a bald statement of additions to funds, a list of
funds and a recital of income and expense with no

238 YALE YESTERDAYS

textual matter, no general summaries, no general
balance sheets — the dimmest of reports in which the
Yale man groped in vain for financial light. It was
not until 1899 that Treasurer Farnam broke the
opaque custom by giving a summary of his twelve
years of stewardship — substantially coincident with
that of President Dwight.

As one glances over these curiosities of Yale
funds — reaching back over the centuries, expressing the
spirit and atmosphere of varying and often discordant
epochs and representing the notions of donors of differ-
ing temperaments — a full realization can be had of
some of the problems which the Yale treasurer must
solve. On the one hand are ancient and outworn whims
personified in faded trust deeds; on the other, the wis-
dom, if not necessity, of consolidating funds and of
simplifying accounts.

As time and Yale history go on, the gifts drift
steadily away from eccentricity and from individual
whim and conform more and more to some special
Yale need — not so broad and deep as her general
need, but still in a large sense utilitarian.

Ill

BRITISH GIFTS TO YALE

The Blount legacy to Yale, telegraphed from Eng-
land in late vacation, and which came as a kind of
benign bolt from the blue, remains at this writing a
mystery both in origin and motive and somewhat
uncertain in its final outcome.1

Of the gifts that are to be classed as primarily or
secondarily English, three stand out vividly in historic
perspective. One is the donation of Elihu Yale that
gave title to the earlier College and later University;
the second, the Newport farm of Dean George Berke-
ley; and, third in order, but first in size and fruition,
the gift of George Peabody that affixed his family

1 The gift by Archibald Henry Blount, Esquire, of Orleton Manor,
Herefordshire, England, amounted to a net $320,085.87, and came
to the University under a second will, dated June 4, 1907. The pre-
cise reasons for the legacy remain today as much a mystery as when
this paper was written. In a careful study of the circumstances,
made in 1914, former Treasurer Lee McClung was unable to dis-
cover any personal connection between Mr. Blount and the Univer-
sity, but was of the opinion that the English donor had become a
believer in the social and political institutions of the United States
(probably through a long neighborly acquaintance in Herefordshire
with that American melodramatist, Captain Mayne Reid) and had
selected Yale as an American university likely to satisfy his
democratic ideals.

(NOTE. This article was written before the legacy was announced,
early in 1914, of a fifth great English gift to Yale— £100,000 from the
estate of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, who, when Sir Donald
A. Smith, had been Chancellor of McGill University, Montreal.)

240 YALE YESTERDAYS

name to the Museum which his nephew, the late
Othniel C. Marsh, even more richly endowed with his
labors as well as estate. To these may, perhaps, be
added the Higgins professorship in the Scientific
School, endowed several decades ago with some
$32,000, the gift of Mrs. Susan Higgins of Liverpool,
a niece of Mr. Sheffield.

The hardly unfamiliar name of Governor Elihu
Yale runs back to the year 1648, when at Boston a
son was born to a Colonial emigrant who, ten years
later, returned to England. There the son received
his education, entered the East Indian service at the
age of twenty and, in time, rose to the Governorship
of Fort St. George, Madras. Those were days in the
British East Indian service when the right hand knew
what the left hand did, though the public usually did
not. Down the obscure streams of history have
floated unsavory rumors of graft and "tainted money'*
as basic rocks of great estates which were carried back
to London. Governor Yale returned to England,
where, in 1714, Connecticut's Colonial Agent, Jeremiah
Dummer, stirred the nabob's at first languid interest
in the future Yale University. The founder's first gift
was the not impressive donation of forty books of
uncertain value, prompting Mr. Dummer's epistolary
comment: "Governor Yale has done something, but
very little considering his estate."

But later the Governor's purse-strings — and
library — relaxed. In 1717 he sent three hundred
more books and a year after "Goods to the value of
two hundred pounds sterling besides the king's picture
and arms." To the trustees of the struggling Col-
lege— maybe moved by that gratitude defined as a
lively sense of new favors to come — these consecutive

BRITISH GIFTS TO YALE 241

donations were mighty gifts; and one reads how at
the Commencement of 1718, they named the College
"Yale" and how Mr. Davenport, one of the trustees,
"offered an excellent oration in Latin expressing
thanks to Almighty God and Mr. Yale under Him for
so public a favor and so great regard for our languish-
ing school."

Governor Yale's total gifts, with the high purchase
power of money in those days, transmuted into our
dollars, amounted to about $5,000. Rarely or never
in the history of our race has so enduring a monument
been bought so cheaply. But John Harvard was a
close second when by a legacy of half his estate or
about seven hundred and fifty pounds sterling — now
representing say $9,000 — he secured title for another
American university of greatness and fame.

The story of the Berkeley farm tells us of a gift
less, perhaps, in name but more unique in its conditions
and records than the benefaction of Governor Yale.
The Rev. George Berkeley, Dean of Derry, Ireland,
and inheritor of four thousand pounds sterling from
"Vanessa" (Mrs. Vanhomrig) and more ardent than
practical as a philanthropist, schemed in his poetic
"Westward the star of Empire" days a missionary
college in Bermuda for the American Indians. With
a royal charter and promises of a government grant,
he set sail for Bermuda in 1728 and, storm-beaten for
five months, landed at Newport, R. I., where, three
miles from Mr. Dooley's modern center of "money,
matrimony and alimony," he bought a farm of ninety-
six acres and stocked it as a basis of supplies for the
Bermuda college, meanwhile waiting three years in vain
hope of the government's grant. Before he sailed for
home, a trustee of Yale had so interested him in the

242 YALE YESTERDAYS

College that from England he sent back a thousand
books and also a deed of the Newport farm. The
conditions of the gift are interesting, not to say
diverting. The rents were to sustain at Yale the
uthree best scholars in Greek and Latin." Candidates
were to be examined annually on the 6th of May — or
if that date fell on Sunday, upon the yth of May — in
public by the President of the College and the "Senior
Episcopal Missionary within the Colony." And there
was provision for dissipating any surplus in book prizes
for Latin composition and declamation on moral
themes. Thus, under the deed of gift, fancy may
amuse itself with the spectacle of President Hadley
and Bishop Brewster of Connecticut as public exam-
iners for the Berkeley scholarships.

Yale took the farm and its scholastic rents. In 1762
it leased the property to Captain John Whiting for
999 years, at a rent of "eighteen pounds sterling and
40 rods of stone wall" until 1769, when the rent was
to go up to thirty-six pounds sterling until 1810 and
then shift to a yearly rent of "240 bushels of good
wheat" until the expiration of the lease in the year
2761. Inquisition at the office of the Treasurer dis-
closes no corner in Rhode Island wheat at present, but,
in lieu, a faded page showing a commutation into $140
a year — authoritatively stated as fair present rent for
the ancient farm.

In a recent report of the University Treasurer
appears the "George Berkeley fund" of the College
entered as $4,800, of which $2,800 represents accu-
mulation and $2,000 the Newport farm; the scholar-
ships are too small to tempt competition often; and
practically, except in the Yale treasury, the Berkeley
book prizes for Latin composition are the sole public

BRITISH GIFTS TO YALE 243

mementoes left of the ancient gifts which were worth
in terms of our present money about $9,000. The tale
is from time to time repeated that the Berkeley farm
now includes a considerable part of the city of Newport
and that the Yale trustees threw away a fortune by the
lease of 1762. But it can be stated on authority that
the farm, separated from the city by a hill, is still far
away from the zone of urban growth and its present
valuation of $2,000 not far below the fact. Perchance
in the year 2761 the Corporation may find it a bonanza.
Last and much the largest in the scope of its univer-
sity usefulness, springing from English sources but not
given by a naturalized Englishman, comes the gift of
George Peabody, born in Massachusetts, but who made
his money in London. Mr. Peabody, foremost man
of his time in philanthropies which were wise as well
as vast, in 1866 gave $100,000 to build the present
Peabody Museum, $30,000 to supply income for the
institution and $20,000 to accumulate as a building
fund. The $20,000 with its interest of thirty-one years
added now amounts to about $150,000, to be used in
time for the central hall of which the present Peabody
Museum is to be the left wing. But even more benefi-
cent was the inheritance which Mr. Peabody left to his
nephew, the late Professor O. C. Marsh, used by him
for the splendid collections of the Museum and they,
with Professor Marsh's old home, the present Forest
School, at last given or bequeathed to Yale — all abiding
memorials of private generosity and devotion to science
and all derived originally from the English motherland.

INDEX

INDEX

Academic Department, funds of,
228, 235.

Adams, William, president of
Union Theological Seminary,
146.

Advisory Board, Yale Alumni,
128, 190.

JEneid, Mason's translation of,
157.

Ailing, John, treasurer in 1702,
225.

Alumni Hall, examinations,
"Statement of Facts" and
Thanksgiving Jubilee held, in,
33-37; "Annual" in, 125.

Alumni Weekly, 124.

"American Biography," Sparks',
165.

American consulship held by Ik
Marvel, 169.

Annuals and Biennials in Alumni
Hall, 33-35, 42, 125, 127.

Arbiter, The, Freshman news-
paper, 213.

Art Building, treasury room in,
237.

Art School, founder of, 30; Ik
Marvel, member of the council
of, 170.

Ashmun Street lot, 194, 195.

Athenaeum, focal center of mis-
chief, 66, 110; recitations in,
107; telescope in, 233.

Bacon, Leonard, one of the edi-
tors of The Talebearer, 144;
grave of, 180; subscriber to
"Centum Millia" fund, 229.

Bagg, Lyman H., author of
"Four Years at Yale," 127,
149; his character and writ-
ings, 149-154.

Baldwin, Gov. Simeon E., Salu-
tatorian, 82.

Barnard, F. A. P., president of
Columbia College. Salutato-
rian, 81.

Baseball, Early, see Sports.

Beccaria, Marquis, treatise of,
140.

Beecher, Lyman, Lecture Course,
65 ; grave of, 181.

Beethoven Society, Horace Bush-
nell, member of, 145.

Begg, William R., highest stand
man during elective period, 83.

Berkeley farm, 241, 243; fund,
242.

Berkeley, Rev. George (Dean of
Derry, Ire.), 237, 241.

Berkeley Oval, 94.

Bermuda College, 241.

Berry, Spoon man, 87.

Biennials, see Annuals.

Billy Bush, 145.

Blount, Archibald Henry (Here-
fordshire, Eng.), 239; legacy,
239.

248

INDEX

Brainard, Cyprian S., donor to

the Yale Medical School, 168.
Brainerd, David, theological
martyr, his early bringing up,
piety, expulsion from Yale and
subsequent life, 162-168.

Branford, historic meeting of
Yale's original ten trustees at,
231.

Bread and Butter Rebellion, 62;
articles concerning, 64.

Brick Row, Old, characteristics
of the Row as compared to
those of the Quadrangle, 8, 9;
buildings in the Row, prices of
rooms, 10-12; the Lyceum, 11-
14; Old Chapel, 16.

Brothers in Unity, Debating So-
ciety, 73; rivals of Linonia,
ceremonials, 74-77.

"Bull Doggerel," poem by Bagg,
150.

Burial of Euclid, see Euclid.

Burr, Rev. Aaron (Newark, N.
J.), 166.

Bushnell, Horace, preacher from
Hartford, 19; appearance and
characteristics of, 145-147.

Cabinet Building, location, 66,

107.
Calhoun, John C., visitor at

Pavilion Hotel, 27.
Calliopean Society, comprising

Southern States' members, 144.
Candy Sam, his appearance and

tricks on the Campus, 100, 101.
Cemetery, Grove Street, 173 ; its

division into lots, 174, 175 ;

Yale men buried in, 176-182.

''Centum Millia," College fund,

228.

Chapel, Battell, compared to the
Old Chapel, 15; Old Chapel,
its location, exterior and in-
terior architecture, 15-17; ser-
mons, pranks and music in, 18-
20; Presentation Day in, 150;
telescope in, 158.
Charter Oaks, professional base-
ball club, 206.

Chase, Frank Herbert, last Vale-
dictory address delivered by,
80.

Chatfield, Charles C., founder of
"The University Publishing
House," 152.
Chittenden, S. B., donor to the

Divinity Fund, 235.
Chronicle, New Haven, weekly

newspaper, 64.

Clark, Sheldon, greatest of the
early benefactors to Yale, 233,
234.

Clap, President, his contributions
to the astronomical apparatus
of Yale, 131; his attitude
towards Brainerd, 164; grave
of, 176, 182; donor to the
Divinity Fund, 235.
Clay, visitor at Pavilion Hotel,

27.
College Courant, The, a weekly

periodical, 153.
Colonnade, a harbor bar room,

24.

Commencement, the College
named "Yale" at the Com-
mencement of 1718, 241.

INDEX

249

Commons, fare, prices, revolts in,

65.

Congress Avenue lot, 194, 195.
Connecticut Hall, men of, 137.
Courant, Yale, parody on Chapel

anthem in, 20.

"Crocodile," eating club, 44, 57.
Croswell, William, a Yale poet,

4.

Daggett, President, grave of, 176.

Davenport, Mr., trustee, 241.

Day fund, The Thomas, 236.

Day, President Jeremiah, survey-
or of Grove Street Cemetery,
175; assistant at the removal
of stones from the Center
Church graveyard to the col-
lege lot in Grove Street Ceme-
tery, 178; donor to the "Cen-
tum Millia" fund, 229.

DeForest, David C., originator
of the DeForest prize, 230.

Divinity College, first of rank in
the Row, 9.

Divinity Fund and its donors, 235,
236.

Donnelly, Jim, Campus police-
man, 93.

"Dream Life," Ik Marvel, 107,
171.

Dummer, Jeremiah, Connecticut's
Colonial agent to England, 240.

Dwight Professorship Fund of
Systematic Theology, 234.

East River, 131.
East Rock Park, 170.
Edgewood, home of Ik Marvel,
170, 172.

Edwards, "Charley," baseball
player, 207.

Edwards, Jonathan, president of
Princeton, 163, 165.

Elective course, 188.

Elm Street lot, 193.

Euclid, Burial of, place of cere-
monies for, 22, 41 ; origin and
ceremonies of, 41-50.

Evarts, William M., speaker at
alumni meeting, 112, 113.

Examinations, "biennials," 34-35,
125-127.

"Facts, Statement of," held in
Alumni Hall, 35 ; origin of, 75.

Faculty, censorship at the "Jubi-
lee," 36, 37; and Commons, 64;
relation between student and,
111, 121, 192; examinations,
124.

Farnam, Treasurer, 238.

Fence, The, Rules of, 5.

Ferris, Theodore, "Candy Sam,"
100.

Field, Yale, 195; cost of, 196.

Fineday, Campus character, 95,
102.

Finley, Rev. Samuel, president
of Princeton, 166.

Football, see Sports.

Forest School on Hillhouse prop-
erty, 23 ; present home of, 243.

"Four Years at Yale," see Bagg.

Fort St. George (Madras), Gov.
Yale at, 240.

Frisbie, Judah, owner of "Pavil-
ion," 27.

Glyuna, see Sports (boating).
Golf, see Sports (golf).

250

INDEX

Goodwin, Mary A., Yale bene-
factress, grave of, 181.

Grant, Eli Whitney's oration on,
140.

Green, burying ground, 173, 178;
games on, see Sports.

Grey, Asa, botanist, 83.

Grove Street Cemetery, see
Cemetery.

Hale, Edward Everett, Unitarian
preacher, 236.

Halley's comet, seen by Olmsted,
132.

Hall, Newman, of London, ser-
mon by, 19.

Hamilton Park, see Sports (base-
ball).

Hannibal, George Joseph, Cam-
pus character, 6, 95-97; tricks
and jokes, 97-100.

Harrison, see Harriman, Henry
B., 58 ; counsel for students in
town and gown riots, 58.

Harvard, John, legacy, 241.

"Heavenly Twins," see Loomis
and Newton.

Herrick, Edward C., treasurer,
226.

Herrick Oak, 226.

Higgins, Mrs. Susan, endowed
a professorship in the Scientific
School, 240.

"High hook," see Brick Row.

Hillhouse, James, property of,
23.

Hillhouse, James A., Treasurer,
founder of Grove Street Ceme-
tery, 173, 174; salary as treas-
urer, 225, 226.

Hoadley, George, bookseller, 113.

Hqoker, "Tom," record hit made
in baseball by, 202.

Hospital lot, 194.

Howe, General, local bookseller
and publisher, 142.

Hubbell, "Gersh," professional
baseball and billiard player,
206.

Humphreys, Gen. David, found-
er of Brothers in Unity Society,
75.

Ik Marvel, see Mitchell.

Indians, missionary to, 167.

Ingersoll, Charles R., counsel for
student in a town and gown
riot, 58.

Irrigation, School of, 23.

Ives, G. A., landlord of "Pavil-
ion" Hotel, 27.

Jackson, Campus character, 95,
102.

"Jubilee, Thanksgiving," 35-37,
47, 99, 150.

Judson, Fred N., teacher in Hop-
kins Grammar School, 128.

Kakichi Senta, Yale graduate,
grave of, 181.

Kent, James, student in Connecti-
cut Hall, 137; brilliant scholar,
138; plagiarizes from Marquis
Beccaria's treatise, 139; donor
to "Centum Millia" fund, 229.

Kilby, Christopher, donor of
astronomical apparatus, 131.

Kingsbury, Frederick J., anecdote
contributed to Alumni Weekly
by, 124.

INDEX

251

"Land Book" of the treasury,
227.

Library, accessions during the
years 1743-1753, 227; gift to,
232.

Library Street and snowball
fights of 1869, 69-71.

"Linonia," debating society, 28,
34; rivals of "Brothers in
Unity," ceremonials, 73-77;
schism in, 144.

Livingston, Philip, donor to
Divinity Fund, 235.

Loomis, Elias, a rebel in Com-
mons, 64; an "Heavenly
Twin," 108, 109; biography
of, 116, 117; physical charac-
teristics, 118; in classroom,
119-121; scientific mistakes,
122; his death and will, 122,
123.

Lyceum, tower of, center for
mischief, 13, 66; classrooms in,
108, 109.

Lynde, Nathaniel, first treasurer,
225.

Marsh, Othniel Charles, grave
of, 180; Peabody Museum en-
dowed by, 240; Forest School
gift, 243.

Marvel, Ik, see Mitchell.

Mason, Ebenezer Porter, sketch
of, 157, 158; his room, 159;
works, 160; death, 161.

Mason, Jeremiah, college careef,
138-140.

McClung, Lee, Treasurer, 239.

Medical School, fund, 228.

Meigs, surveyor of Grove Street
Cemetery, 174.

Miles, William, victim of riot,
57, 58.

"Millia, Centum" fund, 228.

Mill River, 26, 27, 98, 192.

Mill Rock, 21, 22.

Mitchell, Donald Grant, sketch
of, 169; positions held by, 170;
works, 171, 172.

Morehouse, Cornelius S., printer
and publisher, 126.

Moriarty's ale-house, 10.

Morse, Jedediah, father of Amer-
ican geography, 181.

Moseley, proprietor of New
Haven House, 29, 30.

Neilson, Adelaide, in Chapel
gallery, 19.

New Haven Hospital, 194.

New Haven House, college and
city tavern, 29; the last of,
32.

Newport farm, Berkeley gift to
Yale, 239, 242, 243.

Newton, Hubert A., in the class-
room, 108; astronomical dis-
covery made by, 109 ; grave of,
182.

Nicodemus, son of Hannibal, 97,
98.

North College, 10, 11.

North Middle, 10, 11, 13.

Northrop, Birdseye Grant, pio-
neer and promoter in New
England village improvements,
180, 181.

"Novum Organum," Bacon's, 156.

Oak, Herrick, 226.
Oak, Yale, 3, 226.

252

INDEX

Observatory lot, 21, 23.

Off-side play, 219.

Olmsted, Prof. Denison, text-
books of, 132; memoir of
Whitney, 141; life of Mason,
155, 156, 160; grave of, 182.

O'Neill, longshoreman in riot,
54-57.

"Opening load," Spoon ceremony,
36, 87.

Orations, College, 80-87.

Pavilion Hotel, a harbor hos-
telry, 24-28.

Peabody, George, gift of Mu-
seum by, 239, 243.

Peck & Snyder, sporting firm, 202.

Percival, James Gates, poet, 142,
143.

Perkins, Dr., A. E., donor to
library fund, 232.

Phi Beta Kappa banquet, 144.

Pierpont, John, subscriber to
"Centum Millia" fund, 229.

Pitkin, Timothy, subscriber to
"Centum Millia" fund, 229.

Playfair, editor of Euclid, 49.

Porter, landlord of Pavilion
Hotel, 27.

Porter, President Noah, story by,
112, 113; characteristics, 147;
grave of, 176; subscriber to
"Centum Millia" fund, 229.

Pratt, Gen. Daniel, Campus
character, 95, 101.

Presentation Day, Bagg's class
poem for, 151.

Princeton, possible origin of,
165, 166; "rush" tactics, 220.

"Puggling" in football, 219.

Quadrangle, Campus, exclusive-
ness of, 8, 9; open Quadrangle,
66.

Quinnipiac River, 26; boating
on, 187.

"Quinnipiacs," baseball nine, 20.

"Reveries of a Bachelor," Ik

Marvel, 171.
"Roly-boly," for examination,

127, 128.
Root Scholarship, Theological

School, 235.

Rosewell, Richard, treasurer, 225.
Rugby football, 218.

Sachem's Wood (Hillhouse), 22.

Sage, Mrs. Russell, gift of, 21.

Salter, Richard, gift of, 232.

Salutatory, 80-84.

Sargent, shops, 25 ; family, 27.

Schaff, D. S., football revived
by, 218.

School of Irrigation, plan for, 23.

"Seasons of New England," Per-
cival's, 142.

Separatist movement, 164-166.

Seymour, Prof., and examination
papers,

Sheffield, Joseph Earl, 181.

Sheffield Scientific School, exclu-
sion of astronomy in, 130;
Viets fund for, 234.

Sherman, Roger, treasurer, 225.

Sill, Edward Rowland, poet, 143 ;
college life of, 147.

Silliman, Benjamin, grave of,
182; subscriber to "Centum
Millia" fund, 229; biographer
of Sheldon Clark, 223.

INDEX

253

Silliman Lectureship Fund, 235.

Sims, John, undergraduate lead-
er, 54-57.

Skinner, Aaron N., mayor of
New Haven, 182.

Skinner & Sperry, stationers, 121.

Skull and Bones society, 169.

Smith, Sir Donald, Lord Strath-
coma, 239.

Smith, Hamilton Lanphere, as-
tronomer, 158.

Smith, Nathan, grave of, 176.

Snyder, Peck &, sporting firm,
202.

Societies, beginnings and cere-
monies of, 92, 93.

Societies, Ecclesiastical, and
cemetery lots for, 174.

Society, Beethoven, 145.

Society, Calliopean, 144.

South College, 10, 12.

South Middle, last of the Old
Brick Row, 8; condition of, 10;
restored, 14; students in, 137-
143, 147.

Sparks' "American Biography,"
165.

Spoon, Wooden, its origin, com-
mittees and exhibitions, 85-87,
89; program of ceremony of,
88; abolishment of, 89-91.

Sports, Spirit of athletics in the
seventies, hours for, 187-191.
Baseball, cost of, class, 187,

207.

Boating on the harbor and
the Quinnipiac River, 187,
190; Glyuna and Varuna
clubs, 28, 187-190.

Football on the Green, 53,
193, 208-213; songs, 213-
216; rules and plays of,
209, 219.

Hamilton Park, 217-222.

Golf and tennis, 23, 187.

"Statement of Facts," debating

societies' ceremonies, 75-78.
Stiles, President Ezra, anecdotes
from diary of, 62, 131, 139-
142; grave of, 176.
Strathcona, Lord, legacy, 239.
Street, Augustus R., builder of
the New Haven House, 29 ;
father of the Art School, 30.

Talebearer, The, periodical, 144.

Tap Day, early customs of, 92-
94.

Taylor, N. W., theologian, grave
of, 181.

Tennis, see Sports.

Thacher, Thomas Anthony, text-
book edited by, 113, 114; grave
of, 182.

Thanksgiving Jubilee, see Jubi-
lee.

Theological Department funds,
Dwight fund, 234; Root
Scholarship, 235.

Times, New York, football ex-
tract from, 210.

Tomlinson's Bridge, near old
boathouse, 25-27, 187.

Town and Gown riots, student
riots with seamen, 52; riots
with firemen, 53-59.

Townsend, Kneeland, builder of
Pavilion Hotel, 26.

Treasurers, early Yale, 225;
accounts of, 130, 226-229.

254

INDEX

Trumbull collection, 237.
Trumbull, John, treasurer, 225.
Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor,
publishing firm, 126, 128.

Union Club, baseball team,

record of game with, 199-201.

University Publishing House, 152.

Valedictory, 80-84.

"Varuna," see Sports (boating).

Waite, Chief Justice, pupil of
Loomis, 117.

Warner, Wyllis, agent for "Cen-
tum Millia" fund, 226.

Washington's Birthday wars, 67,
72.

Webster, Daniel, visitor at Pa-
vilion Hotel, 27.

Webster, Noah, grave of, 181.

Westminster of Yale ; land for
Grove Street Cemetery, 173 ;
division of lots, 174, 175,
graves of Yale men, 176-183.

White, Phinehas, grave of, 179.

Whitney, Eli, College record of,
140-142; grave of, 181, 182.

Winchester, Oliver F., gift of
land for Observatory, 23.

Wing Yung, Chinese graduate,
215.

Winthrop, Theodore, grave of,
181.

Woolsey, President Theodore
Dwight, Baccalaureate ad-
dress of, 19; original designer
of Alumni Hall, 33, 34;
roomed in South Middle, 143;
student life of, 144, 145;
grave of, 182.

Yale Alumni Advisory Board,

128, 190.

rale Alumni Weekly, 124.
Yale Courant, parody on Chapel

anthem, 20.
Yale, Governor Elihu, early life,

education, gifts of, 240, 241.

ERRATUM
For Henry B. Harriman, page 58, line 12, read Henry B. Harrison.

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